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SERIAL 



PRIGE 25 CENTS. 



Truth Errand. 



It strikes for the overthrow of systems of human oppression, 
and from its pages a fierce light of Truth shall beat in on the 
minds of men. 




Bear a message o'er the Nation, 

And let the People know 
The cause of all this human degradation,- 

The Panics, Poverty and 'Woe ! 



TRUTH ERRAND PUBLISHING CO. 



C. R. NORTON, Agent, 



Providence, R. I. 



TRUTH ERRAND 



/ BY 

J. B. NORTON. 



THIS WORK WILL COVER A BROAD GROUND, BUT A FULL 

STATEMENT OF THE REMEDY IT WOULD APPLY FOB THE 

OVERTHROW OF USURY CANNOT BE GIVEN UNTIL 

A FURTHER ISSUANCE OF THE WORK SHALL 

HAVE PRESENTED MORE OF THE MEANS 

WHEREBY USURERS ARE MAKING 

THEIR GREAT ABSTRACTIONS 

FROM THE PEOPLE OF THE 

AMERICAN REPUBLIC. 



HOW LONG Shall American Producers and 
Consumers Pay Tribute to Usurers? 



'■'■ Ascertain the nature of the disease, tJten.<lpplya i-entedi/.^^ 

JUL 2^ ^^96 ^ 

Tins work will be issued in serial form until the misery wrought 
upon mankind by "Interest" abstractions is fully shown. 



Press of Cornhill Printing Co., Boston 
1896 



H 



l~0 






■)^'t 



[I 

Entered according to act of Congress, in the year 1896, by J. B. 

NoKTOM, in the office of the Librarian of Congress, 

Wasliington, D. C. 



NOTICE. 



Called Usury of old, 
Named Interest to-day; 

Downward it has rolled 
With its thieving way. 



" I Pkay Thee, Let Us Leave Off This Usury." 

Nehemiah, Chap. 5. 



The word Usury used in this work means 
Interest. 

The terms usm"Ous taxation, class taxation, pri- 
vate taxation, refer to Interest assessments, di- 
rectly or indirectly assessed. 

The words Usurous or Usurers are applied to 
individuals, corporations, trusts, syndicates, or 
combinations of any kind that assess interest upon 
men. 



TABLE OF CONTENTS. 



chapter. page. 
Preface ----.__. 

I. The Grand Onward Movement - - - 17 

II. Deceptive Appearances ----- 20 

III. What God Gave All Men - - - _ 24 

IV. Inability of Men to Realize - . . 27 
V. Failure of American Constitution - - 30 

VI. Failure of Religion to Protect Men - - 32 

VII. Blunders of Honest Reformers - - - 35 

VIII. Machinery Working fob MxVn - _ - 37 

IX. Abstraction That Creates Human Poverty 41 

X. Interest and Reprisal ----- 4S 

XL " " " . - - . _ 55 

XII. " " " - . - - - 58 

XIII. Large Lumps of Visible Taxation - - O':! 

XIV. Interest-Monger's Grasp Upon the World 6!) 
XV. Rose by Another Name ----- 73 

XVI. The Great Usurous Combination - - - 75 

XVII. Can the World Get Along Without Usurers SO 

XVIII. Gold Basis and Panic of LSiy - - _ 85 

XIX. The Specie Basis -and Panic of 1S73 - - 01 

XX. Panic of 1893 and Usurers' Busy Times - lot) 

XXI. The Per Capita Circulation - - - - 111 

XXII. Money — Definition of Fiat - - - - 112 

XXIII. Capital — Usury Hinders Its Working - 121 

XXIV. 5 Per Cent. Cash, 95 Per Cent. Check Claim 127 
XXV. Condemnation of Manufacturers - - - 137 

XXVI. Lift Up Our Schools ------ 140 

Bead Notice on Next Page. 



PREFACE. 



LINCOLN'S KAG BABY. 

The "means of production " would to-day be within the 
general reach of all men were it not for the fact that the 
" means of distribution " are so much under the control 
and taxation of the usurers that they can hamper and 
obstruct the movements of all men who are unable to 
quickly respond to tlieir demand for tribute. 

The usurous class receive their power for rol)bery from 
the favors paternally showered upon them by the very 
agents that a sovereign people have selected to administer 
the government. 

The recognition of these plain trutlis are all that is 
necessary for the people to realize in their full importance, 
and then they will quickly see the folly of their sub- 
mittance to sacli ill-conditions as have reigned in this coun- 
try for nearly a quarter of a century. 

By the strength of that sovereign power the people once 
employed for a stretch of years when danger confronted 
them, they should realize the mightiness of that power 
they can now employ. In the days of the rebellion the 
banks went to smash, but the legal tenders came forth 
and sustained the government and made the i^eople 
prosperous. 

In the early days of the civil war Secretary Chase, at the 
request of the bankers, besought Congress to pass the 
National Bank Act. This he afterwards bitterly regretted. 
He is reported as saying : 

" My agency in procuring the passage of the National 
Bank Act was the greatest financial mistake of my life. 
It has built up a monopoly that affects every interest in 
the country. It should be repealed. But before this can 
be accomplished, the people will be arrayed on one side 
and the banks on the other in a contest such as we have 
never seen in this country." — Salmon P. Chase. 

The following press despatch tells you how the national 
banks now stand, but not wliat they have taken from you 
in their third of a century of existence: 



6 PREFACE. 

"Tlie enormous resources of the national banks of the 
United States are shown in the last abstract of their condi- 
tion, completed to-day, as of Feb. 28, 1896, and made public 
by Comptroller Eckles. The 3699 national banks had on 
Feb. 28, $1,951,344,781 in loans and discounts, $192,036,- 
933 in stocks and securities, a lawful money reserve of 
$337,259,922, capital to the extent of $653,994,915, surplus 
fund of $247,178,188, undivided profits of $87,041,526, 
unpaid dividends of $1,233,515, individual deposits of 
$1,648,092,868 and bills payable of $20,104,667." 

The national banks wisli to expand their circulation to 
about seven hundred millions of dollars, and are trying 
to get the greenbacks and silver certificates retired for that 
purpose ; and also want permission to receive an amount 
of circulating notes equal to their full investment in bonds, 
instead of the ninety per cent, now allowed. 

On the first of October, 1894, the circulation of notes by 
these piivate corporations amounted to $202,546,710. As 
they draw a double interest taxation — one from the 
government on their investments in bonds and one from 
the notes a paternal government gives them to fleece the 
people with — it is worth the time to figure how much they 
can extract from the people in one hundred years if they 
compound their interest by repeated loaning. 

In compound interest $100 at six per cent, grows to 
$340.00 in that time, which, multiplied by the $202,546,- 
710, would give us an amonnt, in round numbers, of sixty- 
nine billions of dollars. If compounded at seven per cent, 
it would confiscate one hundred and seventy-six billions 
of dollars ; and at nine per cent, nearly eleven hundred 
and twenty-three billions of dollars ; and if they should 
succeed in raising their circulation to seven hundred 
millions, it would amount, at six per cent., to two hundred 
and thirty -eight billions ; at seven per cent., to six hun- 
dred and seven billions ; at eight per cent., to fifteen hun- 
dred and forty-two billions ; and at nine per cent., to three 
thousand eight hundred and eighty billions of dollars. 

Estimate the wealth of the country to-day ; — think of 
what usury is doing and can do! — that the business men's 
daily deposits place ninety per cent, of that money at the 



PREFACE. 7 

usurers' command continuously for new loans — new inter- 
est levies and compoundiugs; — and judge what the future 
will bring forth if you are not Avise enough to stop the 
robber's hand ! 

Now look at the cost of your gold basis system. The 
last loan of one hundred millions of dollars in gold costs 
the Nation for interest charges alone one hundred and six- 
teen millions of dollars. Duplicate these loans several 
times and without adding one cent to increase your wealth 
you will have an interest bearing debt that will swell 
towards the billions. 

No nation on earth could have stood up so long under 
such a rascally financial system as the American Repub- 
lic has done ; and it is not strange that wretchedness, pov- 
erty, crime, suicide, heart-failure and sudden deaths have 
marked the trail of such a system. 

Is it not possible to have another kind of money that 
will shower blessings upon men instead of poverty and 
degradation ? Take your greenbacks and establish them as 
the primary money of your country, a7id make them so that 
they cannot he used for tisury. Money a nation must have, 
and there is no reason why the Nation should not decree 
two billions of dollars in greenbacks as its primary money. 
Then the people would have something on which to work, 
something to set their capital in motion. Establish such 
an amount of greenbacks under such conditions if it re- 
quires a constitutional amendment to do it! Such an act 
would represent statesmanship. 

The usurers' friend says, '' The greenbacks are an end- 
less chain for drawing gold out of the treasury," yet no 
one wants to draw gold from the treasury except the usur- 
ers, and this friendly screech is but the echo of men who 
have always tried to discredit the greenbacks. 

The usurers whine that the greenbacks are a debt due 
the people which must some day be paid ! • — but who, 
outside of the usurers, is clamoring for their redemption 
by the government ? Individuals everywhere offer to re- 
deem them with their services or commodities, and every- 
one is competing to redeem them the same way. That is 
all the greenback redemption the people want ! 



5 PREFACE. 

Tlie greenbacks were Lincoln's " rag baby." Give 
them a new breatli of life strong enough to make them 
eternal with the life of the American Republic. They 
sent mighty armies into the field in the country's darkest 
hours, and put guns in their hands and food in their 
mouths. They beat off the usurers then, and saved the 
Republic ; and so now let them come forth as the primary 
money of the country under such empowei'ment that no 
usurous hand can ever use them as an instrument of hu- 
man robbery and murder. 

What made Lincoln name the greenbacks the rag baby ? 
The bankers importuned him to use his influence to have 
the Legal Tender Act defeated. He grew tired of listen- 
ing to them, and is credited with making the remark, 
" They all ought to be shot." 

The bankers said that such money was worthless ; that 
it was nothing but rag money ; and that it woukl soon de- 
preciate, and the poor widows and orphans would be robbed 
by them ; but Lincoln said : " Wait until the rag baby is 
born, and then we will see what it can do ! " When the 
armies were going into the field, and the workers at home 
were busily employed everywhere, Lincoln would proudly 
speak of the greenbacks and say : "That is what tlie rag 
baby can do ! " 



SPEECH OF JUDGE KELLY IN PHILADELPHIA, 
PA., OX LINCOLN'S RAG BABY. 

" The patriots to whom I have referred had studied the 
Constitution of the United States. They knew tliat it im- 
posed upon them the duty of saving the Nation. They 
knew that money is the sinew of war, and that it must be 
liad. They knew that the Constitution authorized the 
coining of the public credit into money. They 'smote the 
rock of public credit,' and power and i^rosperity gushed 
forth. 'Smote the rock of public credit!' What does 
that mean ? Why, they called into existence the ' rag 
baby ! ' Tliey said to every man that would work : 
^ Lie re are wages for you ; this rag baby will pay you.' 
They said to ship owners : 'Unfurl your rotting sails and 



PREFACE. 9 

open your liatcliways ; Ave have brought you grain from 
the farm, carry it abroad to buy us clothing and arms ; for 
our industries liave been stricken, and we cannot provide 
ch)thing or arms for the army that is to sustain tlie 
Union.' The ' rag baby ' showered greenbacks upon them, 
and the ships spread their sails, and carried rich cargoes to 
foreign lands, which were exchanged for clothing, arms 
and munitions of war. Industry was rife througliout the 
land. The farmers, who had been without an adequate or 
remunerative market for years, were getting good prices 
for their grain, were paying their debts to tlie local mer- 
chant, who in turn paid his to those of the great cities. 
A marvellous child was that ^ rag baby.' While not yet a 
month old, its name, 'greenback,' not yet familiar to the 
people, it lighted the fires in every forge and furnace of 
the country ; it hired ships, and bought others ; it blockaded 
the whole southern coast; it rallied an army of 75,000 
men, and we soon after heard ringing through the streets 
the shout of well paid and well clad soldiers, 'we're com- 
ing. Father Abraham, three hundred thousand more!' 
The 'rag baby ' was welcomed by every commissary, quar- 
termaster and paymaster. It furnished transportation ; it 
met all demands, and the American people — at least those 
'of tlie free States — with the great war on their hands, 
were prosperous as they had never been before, thanks to 
the marvellous power of the ' rag baby.' * * I name it not 
the ' rag baby; ' I take the derisive term from the door of 
the Presidential mansion. I cannot imply a want of re- 
spect for the constitutional legal tender money of the 
country, the Treasury note, which did all that I have attri- 
buted to the ' rag baby.' " 



HOW CAN PEOPLE SETTLE THEIR DEBTS ? 

" Why were not the active industries of the country able 
to pay their debts? Crops were as good as ever; there 
were the lowest of prices for all of the necessaries of life. 
It is said that there was "overproduction." The industry 
of the people was as active as ever before each of these 
panic epochs. The skill of the inventor was as great. In 
a country where there was overproduction there was suffer- 



10 PREFACE. 

ing for bread and clutliing. But iu all of these crises 
money was scarce : that is, it was in the hands of people 
who were not actively engaged in any business. There 
was not enough to pay obligations ; it was at a premium, 
or could not be had at all. The supplies of the country 
seemed to be in the wrong hands. The obligations of 
active industries seemed too large, and could not be met. 
The capitalists of the country held claims that there was 
not wealth to satisfy. They seemed to have the wealth, 
the money, and the claims which these alone could satisfy. 
* * *■* * * * * * 

Looking at it from the standpoint of the producer, the 
discontinuance of the practice oi' interest taking would be 
an unmixed blessing. He would be able to use the wealth 
which its owners could not use and with it produce more 
wealth. At the same time he could save it for them from 
the inevitable ruin of nature and increase his own sub- 
stance. He would be released from the hard conditions 
which at present so often make production unprofitable to 
all except the money lender. The burden on business 
which now sends the country into practical bankruptcy 
every decade, and makes a failure of ninety-five per cent, 
of all business undertakings would be removed. The 
toiler would not be obliged to hand over his substance in 
interest to those who toil not, and would be able to ac- 
cumulate a surplus of his own, or to shorten his hours of 
toil." — '/. W. Bennett, in Arena. 



READ AND PONDER. 

" Thus in many parts there are hundreds, sometimes 
thousands of persons who, finding little or no demand for 
their services, live in the most exlgeant of all circum- 
stances. Honest, skilled, industrious, in every way capable, 
they are yet devoid of employment, and conscious that 
when the last shilling is spent they are unable to say 
whence the next shall come. It is difficult to picture 
a more appalling spectacle in the midst of civilized society ! 
An industrious, honest, capable citizen, living on the bor- 
ders of starvation because lie can find no demand for the 
skilled services he is able and ready to render! From 



PREFACE. 11 

this cause wages are kept at a low figure, and no effort of 
tlie individual, or of a combination of individuals, will be 
able materially to raise them so long as this cause 
continues. 

The supply of the precious metals in circulation is inade- 
quate to the demand. Were gold obtainable as easily and 
as plentifully as the Manitoba farmer raises and reaps his 
crops, then this evil would soon be brought under control ; 
but as things now are . wealth is unequally distributed 
among the masses of the various countries they inhabit. 
For this ill there is no present effectual remedy — no one 
holds an Aladdin's lamp in his hands by which to discover 
an infinite supply of hidden treasure, and so the annual 
accretions of new bullion raised are scattered over the face 
of society as widely as circumstances will permit." — J. E. 
Endeau, in Westminster Review. 

" BECAUSE THERE IS SO LITTLE GOLD ! " 

'Tis the usurer's taxation, 
Gathered up from the Nation, 
Tliat sends Plenty away 
And brings in Poverty day. 

The spread of the usurer hand 
Covers all the land ; 
And Want and Panics galore 
Often come to the door. 

With the usurer's cry of old — 
" Because there is so little gold!" 
Men are told to be content, 
Working for Interest and Rent. 



USURY. 



THEN AND NOW, BEFORE AND HEREAFTER, UNTIL IT GETS 
BROKEN UP, ALWAYS THE SAME OLD SHE WOLF. 

Extract front the report of a committee of the New York 
Legislature, in 1818 : 

"Of all aristocracies, none more completely enslave a 
people than that of money ; and, in the opinion of your 
committee, no system was ever better devised so perfectly 



12 PREFACE. 

to enslave a community as tliat of the present mode of 
conducting banlving establishments. Like the siren of the 
fable, they entice to destroy. They hold the purse-strings 
of society, and by monopolizing the wliole of the circulat- 
ing medium of the country, tliey form a precarious stand- 
ard, by which all property in the country — homes, lands, 
debts and credits, personal and real estate of all descrip- 
tions — are valued, thus rendering the whole community 
dependent upon them; proscribing every man who dares 
to expose their unlawful practices. If he happens to be 
out of their reach, so as to require no favors from them, his 
friends are made the victims; so no one dares complain. 
The committee, on taking a general view of our State, and 
comparing those parts where banks have been for some 
time established, with those that have none, are astonished 
at the alarming disparity. They see, in tlie one case, the 
desolation they have nnide in societies that were before 
prosperous and happy ; the ruin they have brought on an 
immense number of the more wealthy farmers, and they 
and their families suddenly hurled from wealth and inde- 
pendence into the abyss of ruin and despair. If the facts 
stated in the foregoing be true (a,nd your committee have 
no doubt they are), together with others equallv reprehen- 
sible and to be dreaded, such as that their influence too 
frequently, nay, often already, begins to assume a species 
of dictation altogether alarming, and, unless some judicious 
remedy is provided by legislative wisdom, we shall soon 
witness attempts to control all selections to offices in our 
counties — nay, tlie elections to the very legislature. 
Senators and members of assembly will be indebted to the 
banks for tlieir seat in this capitol ; and thus the wise end 
of our civil institutions will be prostrated in the dust of 
corporations of their own raising." 



NECROMANCY. 

"Better than the lamp of Aladdin, better than the magi- 
cian's wand, even better, far better than the pliilosopher's 
stone, is the economic fable, by whose potent alchemy the 
possessor of a little hoarded wealth can multiply his gold 
ad infinitum and levy contributions on the generations of 



TREFACE. 16 

men to the end of time. It is a magic capable of trans- 
mission witliont the trouble or pains of study. By its 
action liis posterity are made pensioners on all the genera- 
tions of men. Tlie capitalist's wealth is the fabled cup 
which, however often drained, is forever full ; it is the 
purse which always contains a dollar. Verily the capital- 
ist's secret is better than the power of kings. 

But like all necromancy, when unveiled, it is but the 
jugglery of the faking charlatan. When the wealth which 
he lias saved is gone, he mystifies others and takes their 
wealth to supply its place. It is by others' toil that the 
cup is kept full. He shuffles the empty vessel into the 
place of the brimming goblet which in turn he drains. 
His magician's wand is but the barbarous custom of trib- 
ute, which changes not but directs the stream of wealth 
from the hand of the toiling producer into the coffers of 
the money bag. It has obtained so long that men have 
forgotten to resist it. This all-powerful necromancy is 
interest taking." — J. W. Bennett, in Arena. 



THE DREAM OF OUR FATHERS. 

" Our fathers dreamed that th'^y could establish on this 
western continent a nation dedicated to equality, liberty 
and human happiness. It was for this they labored; it 
was for this they fought ; it was for this they endured 
untold sufferings. They saw, as in a vision, a mighty 
brotherhood — none poor, none greatly rich — and over it 
they lifted np a flag made of stars and lines of light — 
light for the wretched and unhappy ; stars of hope for the 
downtrodden and the oppressed of all the world. A little 
more than one hundred years have passed away, and this 
is now a land of princes and paupers, of palaces and hov- 
els, of soldiers and tramps, of great wealth and great mis- 
ery. All the worst features of European — almost of 
Asiatic — degeneracy have already appeared among us. 
The clamor is already heard for a 'stronger government' 
and a larger army; huge fortifications, called armories, 
have sprung up in all our great cities ; and the very chil- 
dren in our schools are being trained, in their callow 
youth, in the arts and instincts of murder. While the 



14 PREFACE. 

Constitution of the United States declares that no State 
shall maintain a standing army, large bodies of troops are 
being organized, uniformed and paid by the several States. 
Our legislatures are butchers' shambles, where each piece 
of meat is hung up and ticketed with its price. Our poli- 
ticians clearly understand that subserviency to the power 
of corruption is the one pathway to wealth and honor; 
and that he who defends the people must accept poverty 
and obscurity for his portion; our newspapers, instead of 
standing on the watch-towers and sending forth ringing 
bugle blasts to wake and warn the sleeping multitude, are 
at work, in darkness and night, digging out the foundation 
walls of civilization, so that the whole grand structure 
may crumble into ruin at the first shot from the cannon of 
the enemy." — Hon. Ignatius Donnelly. 

Wherever the thieving usurer's hand doth go, 
There dotli ever run a tale of liuman woe; 
For it steals the fruits of labor's hand, 
And scatters desolation o'er a smiling land. 

The Republican Manifesto issued March, 1896, Ijy the 
Independent Canada party, says : 

''We are to-day governed not in the interests of our- 
selves — the people of Canada — but in the interests of and 
by an oligarchy composed of corrupt and needy politicians 
and place hunters in Canada, and usurers and bondholders 
in England. We are, as you ktiow only too well, eaten up 
by taxes, the greater part of which go to maintain and 
strengthen the position of these parasites. It is estimated 
that every year Canada has to send out of the country to 
England not less than $30,000,000 to pay the interest on 
government loans, mortgages, bonds, debentures, etc. 
This money comes out of the earnings of a hard-working 
and industrious people. We are in slavery to these poli- 
ticians and usurers." 

THE NINETY AND NINE. 

" There are ninety and nine that live and die 
In want and liunger and cold. 
That one may revel in luxury 
And be wrapped in Its silken fold: 
The ninety and nine in their hovels bare, 
The one in a palace with riches rare, 



PREFACE. 15 

They toil in the fields, the ninety and nine, 

For the fruits of our mother earth ; 

They dig and delve in the dusty mine 

And bring its treasures forth; 

And the wealth released by their sturdy plows 

To the coffers of one forever flows. 

From the sweat of their broAvs the desert blooms, 

And the forest before them falls ; 

Their labor has builded humble homes 

And castles with lofty halls; 

And the one owns castles, homes and lands, 

And the ninety and nine have empty hands." 



MEN OF MODERATE MEANS MUST FALL ALSO! 

" Lest the millionaire should not listen, I would say to 
the men of the middle class of moderate means — farmers 
and others, though they may not now feel the oppression 
of the money power: Arouse to the danger that threatens 
soon to place you at the mercy of corporate and individual 
wealth, as the toiling laborers are to-day. I would say to 
the laborers, now robbed of the just reward of their labor, 
and even compelled in this land of plenty and abundance 
to suffer hunger and cold : Lay aside all manner of bick- 
erings or disputes about minor affairs, and assert your 
independence by going to the polls, uninfluenced by money 
or those in authority, and cast a freeman's vote for repre- 
sentatives in Congress and the general assembly, who will 
be true to your interests and secure the enactment of such 
laws as will permit you to share in the wealth created by 
your toil, and to eat of the bread your hands have earned." 
— Judge Lyman Trumbull. 



WHERE ENGLISH USURERS GATHER IT IN! 

" The net returns accruing to this kingdom annually from 
dividends payable on foreign stocks, bonds, shares, and 
other investments made outside Great Britain are reckoned 
by scores of millions. Mr. J. H. Tritton, a leading mem- 
ber of the eminent banking firm of Messrs. Barclay, Be- 
van, Tritton & Co., Lombard street, thus speaks: 'Asa 
banker, I ask you to stand at my side and look into the 
bill-cases of one or other of the large banks of the city of 



16 



PREFACE. 



London. What do Ave see ? Bills drawn from all parts of 
the world, in respect of every conceivable commodity or 
product of nature available for tlie service of man, all rep- 
resented in terms of British sterling, and all payable in 
London. Whence are the largest amounts drawn ? From 
the great debtor countries of the world — India and the 
United States. This impresses upon us the fact that Eng- 
land is the great creditor country of the world." — London 
Magazine. 

"WHERE IS THE FLAG OF ENGLAND?" 



And the winds of the world made answer, 

North, south, and east and west ; 
" Wherever there's wealth to covet, 

Or land that can be possessed ; 
Wherever are savage races 

To cozen, coerce, and scare, 
Ye shall find the vaunted ensign ; 

For the English flag is there ! 

"Aye, it waves o'er the blazing hovels. 

Whence African victims fly, 
To be shot by explosive bul'ets. 

Or to wretchedly starve and die ! 
And where the beach-comber harries 

The isles of the Southern sea, 
At the peak of bis hellish vessel, 

'Tis the English Hag flies free. 

" The Maori full oft hath cursed it 

With his bitterest dying breath ; 
And th^ Arab has hissed his hatred 

As he spits at its folds in death. 
The hapless Fellah has feared it 

On Tel-el Kebir's parched plain. 
And the Zulu's blood has stained it 

With a deep, indelible stain. 



"It has floated o'er scenes of pillage. 

It has flaunted o'er deeds of shame, 
It has waved o'er the fell marauder, 

As he ravished with sword and flame. 
It has looked upon ruthless slaughter. 

And massacres dire and grim ; 
It has heard the shrieks of the victims 

Drown even the Jingo hjnin. 

" Where is the Flag of England? 

Seek the land where the natives rot ; 
Where decay and assured extinction 

Must soon be the people's lot. 
Go ! search for the once-glad islands. 

Where diseases and death are rife, 
And the greed of a callous commerce 

Now battens on human life 1 

" Wliere is the Flag of England ? 

Go I sail where rich galleons come 
With shoddy and 'loaded' cottons. 

And beer, and Bibles, and rum ; 
Go, too, where brute force has .riumphed, 

And hypocrisy makes its lair. 
And your question will find its answer, 

For the Flag of England is there ! " 
— Lo7idon T/tith. 



Bankers' conventions are very much in evidence these 
days. They resolve upon maintaining the "gold stand- 
ard." They request their members to use all their 
'' influence " to have their customers see that delegates to 
the conventions of both political parties declare in favor 
of gold. They open with prayer. Thus they pray : — 

" To enslave and hold 
This mio'lity nation 
In toil and degradation, 
Give, O give ns gold! 

and help us, Lord! to get rid of the greenbacks, and get 
in our doubly usurous private corporation National Bank 
Notes." 



TRUTH ERRAND. 



CHAPTER I. 

THE GRAND ONWARD MOVEMENT. 

" Onward ! Onward ! Onward ever, 
Unman progress none may stay. 
All who make the vain endeavor 
Shall like chaff be swept away !" 

We quote the above from a short poem that, as 
with the breath of life, sings the song of the hu- 
man march. 

Men are thinking — seriously thinking! 

Unconfinecl by the limitations that hemmed in 
all movements of the forefathers, the trend of hu- 
man thought, unobstructed by the ignorance of 
old, seeks the light of reason instead of the flight 
to caves of darkness. 

The mountainous bulks of barriers and dangers, 
through which no pass was ever to be made by 
man, are now assailed by the forces of a widened 
and widening intelligence, and the frowning peaks 
and insurmountable shapes of the mist clouds of 
custom and human avarice, are constantly surren- 



18 TRUTH ERRAND. 

dering a part of that formation that long courses 
of time hath given them. 

And in the clearing away of the misconceptions 
of the past, this throwing down of its terrors and 
its false gods, a revolution is started that in its 
end in all its beneficial bearings u|)on the affairs 
and conditions of mankind, will be the greatest 
and grandest movement for the establishment of 
human rights, the world has ever witnessed. 

The unequal distribution of the things of earth 
among mankind, the division of men into classes 
which naturally follows in which some have 
plenty, a few more than millions, while the ma- 
jority of mankind who labor and create the wealth 
of the world are firmly held in the bondage of a 
slavery and poverty that is illy in keeping with 
the flowing plenteousness of earth, is certainly 
not a condition created by the Benevolent Almighty 
God. 

It is but an artificial creation made and en- 
forced by man against his fellow man. 

From the days of savagery it has come down 
when the most brutal and powerful of the tribes 
dominated the weaker members and threw their 
burdens upon them to bear, and as civilization 
advanced and the intercourses of men became 
marked by a larger degree of politeness and refine- 
ment the method, but not the severity of the 
enslavement, has changed. 



TRUTH ERRAND. 19 

But savagism survives to-day in all the hab- 
its and customs of the people, and the system of 
human slavery of old has only been changed for 
that of another order which contemptuously throws 
down the responsibility self-interest once imposed 
upon the master of feeding and taking care of his 
slaves sufficiently to prevent their over-crowding 
to the point of exhaustion. 

The Wage System, succeeding the Chattel Slave 
System, was a marked gain for humanity, but the 
Wage System of to-day is the victim of other 
systems that are founded on a right of robbery 
which so encompass it, tax it, embarrass and pau- 
perize it, as to make many people honestly believe 
that the Wage System is but little better, if not 
worse, than the Chattel Slave System. 

And it is against those spoliation systems of 
robbery that the friends of humanity must rally 
and unite their forces, with a determination never 
to cease their warfare until their rebellion becomes 
established as the revolution which tears away 
for all time every shred of legislation that records 
a clause or word that will sanctify or permit the 
brigand's crime. 



20 TKUTII ERRAND. 



CHAPTER II. 

DECEPTIVE APPEARANCES. 

The traveler who is a stranger passing through 
the different sections of the country will behold 
what he considers indications of great prosperity 
among the people. 

He will find well tilled farms and men working 
upon them to the utmost limit of their strength. 
He will find populous cities with finely paved and 
side-walked streets, with residential or business 
structures lining their edges On the business 
thoroughfares, through large plate windows of the 
different emporiums, he beholds goods of every 
description displayed in attractive manner for 
sale, and as he jostles along through the fairly 
well dressed crowds flowing in and out from the 
diff'erent marts of trade, he is naturally led to 
believe that prosperity reigns everywhere. 

He sees life in its most glittering and artificial 
form — mahoganized and gilded saloons, churches 
with stained windows and towering steeples, 
theatres, dance halls, halls for Christian and 
temperance work, libraries, hospitals, newspaper 
offices with bulletined walls, electric cars, steam 



TPaJTIT ERRAND. 21 

cars, telephone, telegraph and fire alarm wires 
stringing in every direction; bnt oh! behind all 
these agencies capable of promoting men's well- 
fare what snffering and misery are concealed! 

Man's injustice to man is not told in the outward 
seeming, for it hides in its glittering magnificence 
the sufferings and w^rongs of the people through 
soulless imposition, as the outer walls of a' hospital 
hide from those that pass the mangled human 
forms and suffering within. 

The land is full of blasted hopes, commercial 
wrecks, impoverished men, untimely deaths, har- 
assing tales of human woe, suffering, degrada- 
tion and crime, and all for no other reason than 
the foolish one, that the human race has become 
so used to paying usurers' tribute, that submission 
has raised the walls of habit so high and strong 
among men as almost to bid defiance to Truth 
to break through, or let its light over-peer and 
let intelligent reason show^ the folly that longer 
permits the usurous leech a place in civilization. 

Think, 0, traveler! as you pass along of that 
conservatism which sustains systems of impo- 
sitions on humanity, that liad their birth in the 
days of a semi-civilization, as deified acts of Jus- 
tice — of that sava«:e hogism which still makes 
man, for the sake of gain or pleasure, rob to pov- 
erty his fellowmen — of that arrogance which 
makes the sucessful hog entertain the idea that 



22 TRUTH ERRAND. 

he is better than the man whose opportunities 
may have been less or whose conscience may be 
greater — of that fal^eism which makes the shal- 
low-brained ape conditions of prosperity they do 
not possess — of that Christianity that looks with 
light concern upon the existing system where the 
favorably circumstanced are constantly assessing 
and collecting taxation upon all whose conditions 
are less favored. Man raising his hand to the 
throat of his fellow for the purposes of plunder 
and proclaiming as social law and social honor 
the right of the victim to sally forth and recoup 
his losses by the plundering of others if he can, 
or failing, to be judged by society as of no 
account, or burdensome, or worthless. 

Think! think of these things, traveler! as 
you look over the farms of the country, the streets 
of the city and towns. Go to the Record Offices 
and look at the instruments of extortion on file, 
the executions for disposition ready to go into the 
hands of the sheriff, and the millions that have 
been issued and carried into effect, and learn 
whether the workers, the real builders of the 
country, have reaped their reward, and, as you 
behold the usurer seated in the serene satisfaction 
of control, judge whether such a civilization and 
such a Christianity hath a God. 

And think of the Roman Empire, and read from 
history's page, that while her temples increased 



TRUTH ERRAND. 23 

and her palaces multiplied and shone with grow- 
ing splendor and flash of gold and sheen, the 
small landed proprietors were robbed by her lazy 
aristocracy and compelled to throw up their hands ; 
how they were driven to the cities to be fed like 
dogs in the streets, with hireling human curs all 
around them in the shape of spies and soldiers 
under orders to take their lives if they should 
make disturbance. 

Once it was considered a great honor to be able 
to make the boast, "I am a citizen of Rome!" but 
the ravages of the Aristocracy made the Roman 
citizen a Roman dog, running city streets in 
quest of a bone. 

History is said to repeat itself, and with the 
tale of the declining Roman Empire will be told 
the fall of the American Republic if its citizens 
are not wise enough and courageous enough to 
rise and demand that their government learn the 
fact that they are sovereign in this Nation. 

But the signs are ominous! the great move- 
ment for the degradation of the American citizen 
has been long plotted and is working. The Press 
and the politicians of the country swim with the 
usurous tide. The Church has forgotten God, 
except as it names Him for revenue. Tramp citi- 
zens are on all our highways and beggar citizens 
in all our city streets. Twenty-five years of gi- 
gantic plundering have made the people used to the 



24 TRUTH ERRAND. 

robber's hand. But, citizens, despair not! The 
sovereign still lives in yourself, and "• God still 
reigns." And your education will not always 
overcome your intelligence, and when that day's 
dawn doth brightly shine you will never be slaves 
of usurers. Let us stop and think awhile. 
What provisions did God make for men on 
earth ? 



CHAPTER III. 

WHAT GOD GAVE TO ALL MEN ON EARTH. 

Before making an inquiry into the reasons why 
the great numbers of humanity are not receiving 
what they ought, it is well to pause and consider 
whether God made such provisions for men's needs 
upon earth as to ensure them a comfortable sup- 
ply of those things necessary for the maintenance 
of life. 

That God did intend the earth should afford 
to man greater benefits than those bestowed to 
other living things thereon, we have ample evi- 
dence in the greater means He has provided for 
man's support. 

He has given to man a superiority of intelligence 
that establishes and maintains man as the ruling 
Lord of Earth, and has supplemented man's men- 
tal force by making the birds of the air, the fish 



TRUTH ERRAND. 25 

of the sea and the animals of the field assist 
him in sustaining life, by furnishing food and 
material for clothing, and by making them become 
aids in distributing the seeds of vegetation over 
the earth, bear burdens, and in different ways aid 
man in subjugating the earth to his liking. 

He has made the earth bring forth a richness of 
things for man's sustenance, and such provisions, 
if man chooses to cultivate them, for such abun- 
dance of necessary supplies that, under ordinary 
natural conditions, the human family, with a 
moderate outlay of exertion, need never know 
what want or poverty means. 

Nor has there been any fixture of a line to mark 
the sharp limit of man's opportunities, for God 
gave in the human brain such a wonderful organ- 
ism that it has gradually enlarged the powers of 
man, until he has become able to employ the air, 
and the water, the minerals and metals of earth, 
in overcoming resistance, and to construct such 
mighty engines for the harnessing of the forces of 
nature as to multiply a thousand-fold the power 
for production. 

With all these benefits open in a great measure, 
in a larger or smaller degree to all, why is it that 
in the midst of this power for, and actual accom- 
plishment of, production so many toilers have 
struggles of the most painful kind to keep up a 
miserable existence, so many driven to commit 



26 TRUTH ERRAND. 

crimes, so many forced to beg in order to get any- 
thing to eat, so many driven from off the earth 
before their time for departure has rightfully 
come, so many losing all hope, all pride, all ambi- 
tion, while a few roll in a wealth of gatherings 
they can never use honestly? 

We hear the hypocritical wail, the kicks, curses 
and rebuffs given to the poverty stricken by the 
very people who thrive in idleness upon the 
incomes derived from schemes which have made 
those same human wrecks they hate to meet. 

Why, we repeat, does all this misery and poverty 
exist for the many, while the few are so very 
rich? Why are these criminals and beggars on our 
street? Why all this loss of hope, pride and ambi- 
tion among men ? Why does the despoiler look 
down with disgust upon his victim ? 

It is the purpose of this book to give the 
answer to these inquirers, to locate and mark the 
crime that is responsible for the present condition 
of humanity so plainly that all men may have the 
opportunity of knowing why such ill conditions 
obtain among men. 

With no apology to any one, it strikes for the 
overthrow of systems of human robbery, and from 
its pages a fierce light of truth shall beat in on 
the minds of men. Education extends intelligence 
among men, but education carried in the wrong 
direction will transform a nationof free men into 



TEUTH ERRAND. 27 

a nation of slaves, for education can disarm and 
overpower intelligence. 

No intelligent person to-day doubts for a 
moment the fact that the earth is capable of sus- 
taining all men. Mai thus, who held it was neces- 
sary for wars and pestilence to thin out the 
ranks of men so that population should never 
exceed the earth's power for sustaining men, is no 
longer an authority quoted in respectable quarters 
but doctrines a thousand times more destructive 
to human life than the welcoming of wars and 
pestilences have been educated into our people 
until the moral perceptions of large numbers have 
become badly blunted. 



CHAPTER IV. 

inability of men to realize the fullness of 
god's gifts. 

In the vastness of the Universe the human 
mind under its best conditions is but a very weak 
affair. So it has been in the past, so it is to-day. 
But in ignorant ages, when the mind was less 
trained to thought, effects following unseen 
causes became established in many instances as 
first great principles. 

Superstition filled the minds of men. Rocks, 



28 TRUTH ERRAND. 

trees, beasts, birds, became gods, or the abodes 
in which the spirits of the gods abided. Men 
were made controllable for the enslavers by the 
holding up of visionary duties which they were 
told must be fulfilled or dire disaster would follow 
while in other cases the superior force of a greater 
brutality made argument a thing considered 
unnecessary. 

Brutality and cunning has ever enabled those 
men that have those characteristics in a large 
degree to triumph over and enslave those who 
possess them in a less degree. Civilization ought 
to be able to hold in check the brutal and cunning 
from committing wrongs against their brother 
men, but civilization has not yet torn out the 
entwinements of the semi-civilization it seeks by 
labored process to get rid of. 

The Vv^orld moves slowly in advancement. Its 
teachers are so wedded to their idol gods that their 
folly is never considered until those idols rot and 
drop in pieces that can never be reunited. 

We look back upon the ignorance and imposi- 
tions of the past, but we seem incapable of realiz- 
ing that very much of our education is based upon 
ignorance of actual facts and impositions uponmen. 

In our own day, and under our own observa- 
tion, we have seen vast assemblages of men shout- 
ing themselves hoarse for their Kings and Queens. 
Not that those Kings and Queens have ever done 



TRUTH ERRAND. 29 

anything for them of a beneficial nature, for they 
have never done anything more for them than to 
tax them, and flatter them on as "loyal soldiers" 
and "loyal sailors," and expose them to the dan- 
gers of mutilation or death in settling quarrels 
those Kings and Queens have made. 

Nor have we got to go to other nations or look 
back to other times to find a reason why the 
unequal condition of men exists, for in our own 
country, the boasted land of the free, where more 
than forty-five of the sixty-five million of people 
in the Nation can read and write, we have beheld 
hundrc'ls of thousands of men, in the excitement 
of fury, in election campaigns, shouting themselves 
hoarse for a lot of tricky or wooden-headed 
candidates, because the politicians wuth brass 
bands and yelling voices have worked them to a 
fever heat. 

The American voting king has for many years 
been a good deal like the Royal King's subjects, 
for a majority of both are king cattle that are 
ever ready to feed upon the weed of a subterfuge. 

The following lines express the motives and 
ambition displayed by the voters of both the 
Republican and Democratic parties in our country : 



"When fiction rises ijleasing to tlie eye 
Men will believe because they love the lie, 
But Truth herself, if clouded with a frown, 
Must have some solemn proofs to pass her down." 



30 TRUTH ERRAND. 

When history's pages are truly written for the 
past quarter of a century, he who runs shall read 
of the people's inability to realize and protect their 
rights, and how, through the pleasant subterfuges 
thrown to them by the subtle and cunning, their 
rights were unwittingly surrendered to very nar- 
row and harrowing limitations. 



CHAPTER V. 

WHY THE AMERICAN CONSTITUTION FAILS TO 
PROTECT THE PEOPLE. 

Our Republic is supposed to be the best exam- 
ple of free government existing on earth, yet it is 
absolutely nothing else than a limited Democracy, 
affording no more real liberty to the people in 
general than that enjoyed by those of the limited 
Monarchy of Great Britain. 

In 1776 the Philadelphia Bell rang out, "pro- 
claiming Liberty unto all the Land and unto all 
the inhabitants thereof." This represented at 
that time the revolt against King George and 
the despotism of his government, which sought to 
impose taxation of a harassing nature upon the 
American Colonies, while at the same time deny- 
ing them representation. 



TRUTH ERRATSTD. 31 

That taxation was direct enough to be visible 
and consequently very objectionable to our fore- 
fathers, who first resolved to get rid of it by ob- 
structing its collection and afterwards made up 
their minds the only way they could do it was to 
get rid of King George and his government al- 
together. 

This they succeeded in doing after a long and 
bitter struggle, and they then united in the form- 
ation of a government, laying its foundations upon 
such principles and organizing its powers in such 
form as to them seemed most likely to effect 
their safety and happiness. 

At that time the industrial organism of the 
country was but an infant affair compared to the 
giant existence of to-day, and private taxation was 
not interwoven in and around everything, as it 
became later on, in an ever increasing degree. 

And our forefathers, entering upon the work of 
an experiment of government that seemed fraught 
with dangers in every direction, passionately divi- 
ded among themselves as to the best method to 
pursue, after making such departures as they 
thought necessary, and rejecting what they con- 
sidered antagonistic, reestablished the institutions 
of the limited Monarchy they had separated from 
and gave us the limited Democracy known as the 
United States of America. 

And it is because our Democracy is a limited 



32 TEUTII ERRAND. 

one, nursing slave institutions like those of the 
monarchies of the Old World, that the American 
Republic has failed to secure to the people tlie 
rights they ought to eujoy. 

Once already has our Nation waded knee-deep 
in fratricidal blood to wipe out the institution of 
Chattel Slavery, and to wipe out other institutions 
of human slavery its sons may again be com- 
pelled to engage m a life and death grapple, un- 
less for the miserable statescraft of the present 
day, we can substitute a broad statesmanship suf- 
ficiently great to give us a Democracy that shall 
contain no paternal institutions for giving private 
individuals and their coud)inations in clubs op- 
portunities for inflicting their needless and uncom- 
pensating taxation upon the people. 



CHAPTER VI. 

why powerful religions fail to establish 
men's eights. 

Mankind must not look to any of the Religions 
of the day for the removal of the wrongs under 
which they suffer. 

Some of these religions have existed almost 
co-incidentally with man's enslavement. 



TRUTH ERRAND. 33 

Througli the teacliings of many of them are vir- 
tues upheld, which if impressed to the fullness of 
their measure upon man, would long ago have over- 
thrown the governments of the merciless brigands 
who rule the v/orld with their laws of despotism. 

Justice, Truth, Mercy, Charity, and hosts of 
other precepts have been held up by scores of 
religions for man to practice. 

Christianity has assembled together the great 
virtues of them all, and being the religion of the 
greatest number of intelligent people has had the 
greatest opportunity to impress these virtues on 
the world over that of every other religion. 

Yet Christianity, like its predecessors and con- 
temporaries, has grievously failed in bringing 
about just conditions among men. 

Its priests are as weak in the denunciation of 
those wrongs as those of other religions are, and 
have been, and to keep its moral responsibilities 
limited to those conditions that arouse the small- 
est, antagonism is, and has been, the aim of them 
all in modern times. 

But to-day, the Christian Church confronts a 
larger intelligence among men, and they protest 
against the Church lethargy in regard to the wel- 
fare of mankind, and insist that it shall cease to 
act as a police power in upholding institutions of 
wrong, whose natural workings are but the impov- 
erishment and degradation of humanity. 



34 TRUTH ERRAND. 

In the early days of the Christian Church Jesus 
said: ''Render unto Ctesar the thhiQ-s that are 
Caesar's, and unto God the things that are God's"; 
so now mankind, in these days of intelligent 
power for discerning right from wrong, say to the 
Christian Church: Go falfill thy duty and carry out 
that command, and restore to men those things 
God appointed for men's free use and benefit. 

With an organization that is complete, with a 
sway world-wide, the conditions that now obtain 
could never exist, except by the sanction of its 
silence, which is made to justify the interpreta- 
tion of its approval. 

The singing of hymns to God, the ministration 
to the unfortunate sick, and the Ijiirial of the 
friendless dead, are all worthy things for the 
Christian Church to do, but it has responsibilities 
that run up to and beyond these that call for the 
using of its powers for the removal of the causes, 
which are the flowering plants, that bring forth 
the plagues of human poverty and degradation; 
and which only remain existant through a contra- 
vention of the will of the Almighty God by the 
worldliness of the Christian Church, and the 
guilty shirking of duties it ought to perform. 

Will the Christian Church meet its responsibili- 
ties and move for the relieving of humanity from 
the wrongs of a needless and terrible cross? 
Or shall the friends of a larger, more earnest 



TRUTH ERRAND. 35 

and intelligent Christianity have fall on their 
hearkening ears that doleful, miserable answer 
Cain, gave as to the whereabouts of Abel : "• Am 
I my brother's keeper?" 

But let mankind wait not for any religion to 
cut the way for man's regaining these God-given 
rights upon the face of this green earth, but with- 
out apology to any creed, or to any set of men, 
let them take possession of what God has created 
for them. 



CHAPTER VTI. 

WHY HONEST REFORMERS BLUNDER AND FAIL TO 

LEAD. 

Theorists and dreamers having the welfare 
of humanity at heart have spun out their exposi- 
tions for the betterment of the conditions of men, 
from the mightiest wrongs to the lightest injuries. 

They touch the great extremes and cover all 
ground between the annihilation of the State, on 
the one hand, by the installation of the individ- 
ual in undisputable supremacy, and on the other 
hand they establish the State in such preeminence 
and in such tyrannical form as to thoroughly ig- 
nore the individual for the purpose of obtaining 
the utmost limit in human economy. 

Having started out with the consciousness that 



36 TRUTH ERRAND. 

something is wrong in the dealings of men, these 
reformers, whether as Anarchists, Commmiists, 
Single Taxers, Nationalists, Socialists, or under 
whatever title they enunciate their principles, 
have kept on thinking and theorizing, ever going 
further and further, dissecting every stringer that 
unites condition with condition, until they have 
reached to their own satisfaction a human 
state so equitable that there is nothing left for 
man to hope for on earth further in that direction. 

But they betray their own impracticability in 
their failure to take into account the immense 
potentiality of resistance involved in the exten- 
sion of their line of attack, beyond the overthrow- 
ing of the great wrongs that oppress humanity, 
in seeking to make humanity become an aggres- 
sor against itself, by destroying all its habits of 
lesser concern, for the purpose of installing new 
and untried methods in the government of life 
which may be no better, and possibly worse, than 
those of to-day. 

Establish to-morrow the conditions they lay 
down as necessary in full throughout the civil- 
ized world and we would find them meeting with 
ignominious failure, for the reason that they need 
for their practical working the creation of a new 
race, wholly different from that which exists 
to-day, or what their descendants, for generations 
afar, can ever hope to be. 



TRUTH ERRAND. 37 

Time, indeed, may bring forth that universal 
fairness of character which may establish an 
indisputable justice from the weakest to the 
smallest detail in all controllable actions of human 
concern, or, in its evolutions, that universal 
plenteousness and variety of things which sustain 
the body and feed the mind, as to extinguish the 
fires of human ambition. 

_ But such an age is not upon us, and humanity 
must unify its forces against the power of its 
oppressors and battle down their institutions of 
oppression instead of arraying itself against itself. 



CHAPTER VIII. 

MACHINERY : A WRONGFUL LOCATION OF OPPRES- 
SIVE POW^ER. 

A Great many reformers cry against machin- 
ery as something that injuriously works against hu- 
manity, and mournfully foretell the day when 
the greater part of humanity will be thrown out 
of employment on account of its ability to supply 
the wants of the world. 

But their blindness lies in their inability to lo- 
cate the causes of human oppression and to dis- 
cern the fact that machinery is advancing man- 
kind in comfort, intelligence and independence. 



d» TEUTH EREAND. 

A leading socialist writer instances the sewing 
machine to support his statement that the toilers 
have not been benefited by machinery. 

As to the overworked and underpaid sewing girl 
this is true ; but it is within the limitation of a 
practical remedial cause, and beyond that it is en- 
tirely incorrect; and so it is within the lines of 
easily remedial causes that all the great griev- 
ances lie that now exist in the line of oppression 
to human toilers. 

The engine driver is really a slave while doing 
duty upon his locomotive ; but his is a responsibil- 
ity that society cannot throw down, unless it is 
willing to relinquish the benetit of his onward, 
rushing train, though that benefit be not what it 
ought to receive, or what it will receive when it 
enforces its rights, yet even now more beneficial 
than anything that preceded it in that direction. 

So the needle-woman of the machine, though, 
personally unfairly used, is supplying a greater 
field of wants than her sister with the simple nee- 
dle ever did. More -clothing is being supiDlied, 
and a greater number of people are finding em- 
ployment in preparing the material and shaping 
the goods she unites. The place of activity is 
changed from the house to the factory, and greater 
numbers of people are receiving more articles of 
comfort, protection, and adornment than ever could 
be delivered under the old dispensation. 



TRUTH ERRAND. 39 

The avocation of the old woman who patched 
stockino's on the sidewalks of Paris cannot be fol- 
lowed, for the reason that the machine sends forth 
the new product in many grades cheaper than 
the old can be cleaned and repaired, asserting its 
benefits to mankind by establishing an economy 
in the waste that throws the worn article to the 
jnnk man for disposal and reproduction -in other 
lines of utility. 

Wherever machinery has been most extensively 
used a larger intelligence has been installed, al- 
though the operatives have not, in all cases, re- 
ceived the benefit of the enlarged education it 
gives society opportunities to obtain, for the rea- 
son that society is yet full of hoggish slaves who 
love the chance and fraud of the vile systems 
which allow them to work their wits in the plun- 
dering of men. 

But the Avorld moves onward very rapidly in 
these days, and the intensification of greed and 
the extension of the reachings of those institutions 
which work, to the utmost limit, things of wrong, 
invites the destruction that intelligent, maddened 
humanity decides shall be their doom. 

When Eli Whitney invented the cotton-gin and 
made the separation of the seeds from the cotton 
an easy matter of accomplishment he created a 
new condition which made the conversion of cot- 
ton into wearing apparel a profitable business. 



40 TKUTH EERAND. 

But they tell us it was this invention that tight- 
ened the cords and increased the pain of Negro 
slavery in the South . 

And 3^et the whole world gained through it all. 
Millions gained warmth and protection to their 
bodies, while hundreds of thousands gained a 
means of supporting life through the channels it 
opened for labor, and through the following of its 
beneficial streams, in conjunction with those that 
preceded them, was born and craddled that 
spirit of humanity, that at last overthrew the 
institution of Negro slavery. 

So, wherever we turn to investigate the facts 
connected with the rise and improvement of 
machinery, we there find the register of the advance 
of humanity, and to very little else than the 
opportunities it has made and the improvements 
it has established do men owe that superiority of 
intellect that is fast giving them the courage 
and resolution to proceed to tear down all class 
institutions of human oppression without any 
reference to their sacredness of age as recorded 
upon the tombstones of the past. 



TRUTH ERRAXD. 41 



CHAPTER IX. 

THE ABSTRACTION THAT CREATES HUMAN 
POVERTY. 

"I want my Interest ! 
And I will cut the flesh 
From his breast! " — Shylock. 

" Know you then tlie Truth ! 
The Truth will make you great, — 
Shall make you Free ! " 

With unlimited resources, with powers of pro- 
duction that can always be kept greater than the 
necessities of man, why is there need of so much 
enforced crowding down of men to misery, pov- 
erty and degradation ? 

Write this question on every- available spot that 
the eye of man can reach until, as from his 
soul, the memory of men shall bring it forth at 
the instance of every robbery committed through 
the instrumentality of the legislative crimes that 
are written down as "Law." 

This centralization of thought upon the burn- 
ing wrongs of the day will become the vivifying 
warmth that will cause intelligent humanity to 
energize a resistance that will grind to dust the 
rocks of error on which these crimes are founded. 



4j: truth eruand. 

The great masses of the people are robbed in 
all directions by institntions for class aggrandize- 
ment that have do right to any place in any 
decent state of civilization. 

These institutions are of private ownership, and 
are hostile to every interest of our citizens; but 
they enforce such powers of government as to 
make the sovereign State supply all the machinery, 
all the power required for its running, and all the 
tenders for its operation. 

These individuals, compelling the government 
to allow them to take possession of, and operate 
one of the government's greatest prerogatives, also 
demand that the government grant them paternal 
protection, by courts and military power, while 
they, in arduous toil, by clerky hands, write up 
their impositions of impoverishing taxation upon 
the people of the Nation, in proportions thousands 
of times greater tlian any sovereign State itself 
would dare to assess. 

Usury condemned of old, condemned by the 
Bible, dauniable under any and all circumstances, 
makes its dark and withering presence felt 
throughout all the land. 

The great productive power of machinery, 
developed most largely during the past three- 
quarters of the present century, has presented a 
rich field for the usury taxers, and multiplied 
almost endlessly their power under the legislation 



TRUTH ERRA]SrD. 43 

which they have successfully directed, to wind in 
and about the pursuits of man the chains of their 
despotism, and, as the natural results of their 
crimes, human misery and human degradation 
abound in all directions. 

People will some day learn the cost to them of 
supporting some of the folly gods of their fore- 
fathers, who, on account of their weakness, were 
obliged to do many things which people of to-day, 
if they unite and do not let their education des- 
troy their intelligence, need not be obliged to do. 

The Interest-god they were obliged to carry 
sacrifice to ; and we of to-day are doing just as 
they did, and in a larger degree with our enlarged 
opportunities, because the usurer says so; but 
this old god of our reverence is something that 
should now be kicked out, with its thieving old 
fakir priests, into those dumping grounds where 
old superstitions and immoral ideas are fast going 
to swell the rubbish heap. 

In some of the old countries, where they find a 
man who is always looking for the best end of 
everything, the people contemptuously speak of him 
as having big eyes, and wherever you find a 
usurer there you will find the man whose big eyes 
let nothing escape him that his taxation can 
safely reach. 

In our country the levies of the usurers' taxation 
are laid upon the movements and upon all things 



44 TRUTH ERRAND. 

men use. We can turn no way but what we will 
find the usurers' taxation staring us in the face. 
The house man constructs or rents for a habita- 
tion, the transportation method he employs, all 
implements he uses in his callings, on the land he 
tills and the crop it brings forth, on all his 
exchanges, in the swelling of the government 
levies, and in the simplest reach of the people in 
all activities, you will find those impenetrations 
that the greedy usurers, as with the cut of a worm, 
have made as their abstractions. 

If there was any compensation in the robber 
taxation the usurer inflicts upon the people by 
their putting something into the world to com- 
pensate for the poverty they cause to mankind, 
there might be some excuse for permitting them 
thus to prey upon mankind with their tricks and 
devices. 

But there is none whatever, for their taxation 
is nothing but a pure abstraction, levies of the 
idle upon the consumers and producers of a 
nation that have no foundation for existence out- 
side of that miserable principle of low state-craft, 
which thinks it a good thing to farm out taxing 
powers to those wdio have much on account of 
their having much. 

Usury is the dark curse that has come down to 
us from the days of a semi-civilization, and as a 
withering and destroying and continuing plague 



TRUTH ERRAND. 45 

it bothers agriculture, commerce, manufacture 
and all producing and consuming humanity in 
general . 

Taxing, interfering with and forever disturbing 
the nation, impoverishing millions of individuals 
to the verge of cruel want and despondency by 
its red-handed stealings from the land, the houses, 
the exchanges and intermingling of the people, 
without adding a particle of wealth to the nation, 
it centralizes, in painful processes, the wealth of 
the many into the hands of a small usurous class, 
whose accommodations and extortions can be dis- 
pensed with by the government doing its duty 
and exercisino; its full functions for the benefit of 
the people. 

To-day we have the vast amount of interest 
taxation still further increased in all the dealings 
of men by the reprisal system, which makes those 
who meet the first levy of interest taxation resort 
to a profitable recovery upon the first party with 
whom they make an exchange or loan a credit, 
who, in turn, proceeds to make another profitable 
reprisal, as he passes it along to others, who will 
also repeat and extend the previous taxation. 

And let Labor mark the fact that the real pro- 
ducers and consumers are made the dumping ground 
for all this taxation not carried by the flowing 
streams of individual repudiation and commercial 
wrecks to outlawry, or to the bankruptcy courts 



46 TRUTH ERRAND. 

that adjust, for the benefit of whom it may con- 
cern, such leavings as may result after the se- 
cured usurers and expenses have been provided for. 

And let Labor also carefully mark the fact, 
that with nothing but Labor to sell, it has no 
power to use the reprisal system to throw off on 
some one else the force of the impact of interest 
and reprisal taxation made upon itself, and that it 
must submit to small reward for its services. 

Labor should iniderstandingly realize the fact 
that the great drainage which interest makes upon 
men in all directions predisposes and even often- 
times compels men, in self defence, when employ- 
ing labor to treat it as a commodity to be purchased 
as cheaply as possible, without any regard to the 
moral aspect of the bargain. 

And Labor should thoroughly understand that 
not only is interest taxation one of the most pow- 
erful factors for keeping the rewards of labor 
down, but that it also directly defrauds labor by 
destroying in a great measure such reward as 
Labor succeeds in obtaining, through the compell- 
ing of the laborer to settle, without any chance 
of making any recoupment, the heavy interest tax- 
ation that is interwoven in everything he uses to 
maintain himself, whether it is rent, groceries^ 
clothes, or whatever he buys. 

All of these things the laborer will understand 
if he carefully reads this book, and also many 



TRUTH ERRAND. 47 

Other things which to him may have seemed sur- 
rounded with unfathomable mystery, for the usur- 
ers have studied to blind men that their systems 
of robbery might go on, even going to the pains 
of making our education a part of their scheme. 

And not only they who work directly for hire, 
but men of every calling — farmers, traders, manu- 
facturers, merchants and every honorable man, be 
he who or what he may that reads these pages, 
will find an opportunity, if he has never had one 
before, to learn a little of the mighty wrongs im- 
posed upon millions of people, by the vile systems 
of usurous taxation, and can use his intelligent 
reasoning power to decide if it is not about time 
this method of impoverishing men should stop, in 
our country at least. 

And not only they, but our very teachers whose 
spirit may be outside of the usurer's school, if 
they will ponder over the mighty facts recorded 
on these pages of the causes of human oppression, 
may awaken to a sense of shame for their guilt in 
allowing those things to pass on unchallenged. 



48 TRUTH ERRAND. 

CHAPTER X. 

THE INTEREST AND REPRISAL COMBINATION. 

We have spoken of reprisal taxation, and we 
will now^ proceed to show something of its power, 
and give an idea of the robberies committed by 
both Interest and Reprisal in the every day com- 
mingling of producers and consumers. 

Few people, outside of those actually engaged in 
the manufacture and exchange of goods, have any 
idea of how the percentage additions are made up 
and figured on to the cost of the goods before 
they are exposed for sale, and even very few of 
those realize to what an important extent usury 
and the reprisal for usury are interwoven in the 
make up of tliose prices, and how the usury is 
constantly increased along the whole movements 
of the goods by the handler's percentage addition 
to the cost. 

The manufacturer, before he can add his profit 
charge to the goods, has first to make up the esti- 
mates of their cost as made up from the different 
assemblings that he forms into a union, the cost 
of the altering agents that may have worked 
upon them, the labor involved, the wear and tear 
of machinery waste, rents, power. State and 



TRUTH EREAND. 49 

municipal taxation, interest upon investments, as 
well as the cost of marketing the goods, and very 
often their delivery, and tlie discounts he is 
forced to submit to for early payments upon the 
goods and for many little expenses constantly 
arising and which he generally classifies as 
''incidental expenses." 

In nearly all of those items which the manu- 
facturer must take notice of, with the exception 
of the labor directly involved, are large entwine- 
ments of usury; but he takes no notice of them as 
such, for they are enfolded in the price of the 
things as cost name. 

But it is well for the people to give them notice, 
for the usury that has entered into the goods is 
going to be of an enlarging nature, although that 
usury increase goes not directly to the usurers, 
whose levies are now to be assessed into the goods 
by the manufacturer who has to uieet the usurers' 
levies. 

If that manufacturer considers that 25 per cent, 
is a sufficient amount to add as incidental expen- 
ses to the figures he has gathered of costs that he 
can easily specify, to cover those he cannot sepa- 
rately enumerate, then the usury already in the 
goods is increased 25 per cent., and then that 
enlarged amount will still be further enlarged by 
the charge added to the goods as profit, and if 
that percentage is 50 per cent, then 50 per cent. 



50 TRUTH ERRAND. 

more must be added to the sum the 25 per cent, 
addition has made. 

No matter what the amount of the usury con- 
cerned amounts to, whether we figure it detach- 
edly or connectedly with the manufacturers' selling 
price, it is always relatively increased by the inci- 
dental expense and profit charges. 

To show how this increase is made so that all 
may understand, we will say that on a certain lot 
of goods the usurous entwinements amount to 
|110.00, and then add 25 per cent, to this to 
cover unenumerated shop expenses, and you in- 
crease the amount $27.50, which added to the 
$110.00 brings the amount up to $137.50, and 
the 50 per cent, of profit charge adds $68.75, 
making the total reach $206.25. 

By looking those figures over carefully you 
will find that on account of $110.00 in usury 
charges that met the manufacturer, that manu- 
facturer in making his reprisal has increased the 
amount of the tax he has met $95.25, swelling 
the grand total of the usurous tax thus far to 
$206^^25. 

Now the jobbers who take those goods from 
the manufacturer go through nearly the same 
process of figures that the manufacturer does, 
although in many cases they do not stop to sepa- 
rate the shop expense and the profit expense from 
each other in making up their selling price ; but in 



TRUTH ERRAND. 51 

all cases where tbey do not the percentage figures 
blankets both in. 

They all have many expenses to provide for — 
rents, clerk hire, transportation charges, insur- 
ance, interest charges, discounts, traveling ex- 
penses, and, outside of the labor they directly 
employ, more than one-half of all these charges 
are made up of or directly existent through usury. 

If they want to average 25 per cent, on their 
sales as profit it is necessary for them to mark 
their goods on an average selling price 50 per 
cent, higher than they cost, marking some higher 
where the market permits it, and some very much 
lower where the market so demands. 

But we will figure only 33i per cent, as the 
amount of the combined shop expense and profit 
charge that the jobbers add to the goods and drop 
all intermediary agents which may stand between 
the jobber and the retailer, for it is primarily our 
object to show that usurous entwinements in the 
price of goods make growth with travel greater 
than the people are aware of, or would tamely 
submit to if they did realize. 

Taking the amount of $206.25 which we have 
seen the usurous insertion of $110.00 grow to 
by the manufacturer's shop expense and profit 
percentage addition, and adding 33^^ per cent, to 
it, to the goods leaving the jobber's hands, which 
makes the sum grow to $273.66, and passing those 



f52 TRUTH ERRAND. 

same goods to the retailers to dispose of at the 
same average profit and expense charge, and we 
find that the people who buy the goods have paid 
$366.66 for usury because there was a usury 
charge of $110.00 at the start. 

We will take a bill of $3,000 and run it through 
just the same percentage additions as we added 
for manufacturers, jobbers and retailers expense 
and profit charges and we will find that it 
amounts to $10,000; but if we take the $3,000 
and add a usurous tax of $110.00 and repeat the 
same operation we have the sum of $10,455.54, 
showijtg that the usury has grown to $455.54. 

As to the reader, the usury increase in the cost 
of goods as they are moved along is now notice- 
able through the reprisal made by the percentage 
additions on their way to the consumer before show- 
ing other examples to illustrate the usurous injec- 
tions into the prices of goods w^e wish to direct 
attention to the fact that the injections so made 
by the business men are done through compulsion, 
and not through choice. 

Usury has increased its obstructive power in 
everything entirely out of proportion to the labor 
wage of the day, and is constantly conspiring to 
increase its levies by forcing the price of labor 
down in order that the producing power of the 
country shall be more and more within its taxable 
control. 



TRUTH ERRAND. 53 

There is no business bouse in the country that 
has fixed percentages to rigidly apply alike on all of 
their transactions; for usury, directly and indi- 
rectly, plays through the various movements of 
men with such varying taxation that men cannot 
fix the confines to stake it in, and get at a 
measureable idea as to the amount of its abstrac- 
tions. 

Consequently without any fixed rules founded 
upon honorable principle, business of nearly all 
kinds becomes one of chance and virtual fraud 
and compels men to follow that rule that advises 
men to "buy in the cheapest and sell in the dearest 
market," which means the crowding down of 
those you buy from as low as you can without 
any regard as to whether you are paying 
them fairly or pushing them to sacrifice, and to 
sell at the highest point you can reach without a 
thought as to whether or not you are forcing an 
abstraction that may be entirely unjustifiable. 

Goods go into the hands of the consumers at 
two, three, four, and even more times greater 
price than that the producer receives for them, and 
at the same time that producer has been obliged 
to bring forth the goods at prices he cannot 
flourish upon, for usury directly and indirectly 
abstracts not only his surplus, but encroaches 
even upon his power for continuing existence. 

The agencies that forwarded the goods charged 



54 TRUTH ERRAND. 

high commissions and augmented the prices of 
the goods until the market received them only 
under the most laborious conditions, and yet these 
agencies have not reaped the benefit of the per- 
centages they charged, or even a respectable por- 
tion of them, for usury has drained right and left, 
front and back of them, until there is but little, if 
anything left. 

And all of these uncertainties and ill-payments 
of men for their labor are but the result of usury 
and the reprisals men attempt to make on one 
another to get rid of it themselves. The red- 
handed usurer — the syndicates, trusts, corpora- 
tions and agencies he has working in his interest, 
and a few others win the successes in life while 
the many fail, for the conditions under which 
they work are unnatural, as must be evident 
to all who watch as they see one by one 
of those who achieved success for a time, and 
shifted by the reprisal the load cast upon them, 
at last unable to make the shift fall beneath 
.the weight that has carried the great numbers 
down. 



TRUTH ERRAND. 55 

CHAPTER XI. 

THE INTEREST AND REPRISAL COMBINATION. 

We will now show the interest and reprisal 
workings in extending taxation from a clean 
business transaction which will be clear to every 
person that understands how goods are carried 
from the manufacturer to the consumer and 
under more favorable conditions than three- 
fourths of those goods now go out. 

A, B & Co., a house in a western city selling to 
jobbers, write to C, D & Co., commission mer- 
chants in New York city, asking them for certain 
goods on four months' credit. 

As A, B & Co. are considered good in respon- 
sibility, C, D & Co. decide to fill the order, and 
on making investigations they learn that on a 
spot cash basis they can procure the goods for 
$28,800. 

C, D & Co. do not wish to overcharge A, B 
& Co., whom they look upon as good and safe 
customers. The interest charges must be paid, 
and they can either cover them in by a 10 per 
cent, profit charge, which is considered very low 
and favorable for the buyer by almost all the 
business houses, even when the buyer pays cash 



56 TRUTH ERRAND. 

for the goods, or they can charge the interest 
directly to A, B & Co., and only ask a 5 per cent, 
commission, which they decide to do. 

Taking collateral securities to the bank they 
are informed that they can have accommodations 
upon them for six months at the rate of 8 per 
cent, per annum, or 4 per cent, for six months, 
which C, D & Co. consider safe as a matter of 
business precaution to cover a possibility of A, 
B &-Co. making a part of the payment behind 
time or asking for a short extension upon the 
whole. 

As the bank deducts the interest in advance, 
they are obliged to call for $30,000 in order to 
receive the price of the goods, $28,800, the inter- 
est being |1,200. 

Charging 5 per cent, profit, they figure it on 
the $30,000 which the goods actually cost them, 
and send them to A, B & Co. with a bill for 
$31,500, which is just $100.00 less than it would 
have been if they blanketed the interest in and 
said nothing about it with a 10 per cent, charge. 

A, B & Co. receive the goods and sell the 
same to retail stores at 20 per cent, advance, or 
for $37,830. 

The retail stores sell the goods to the people , 
at an average profit of 35 per cent., or for 
$51,070. 

The disposition of the goods concluded, we can 



TRUTH ERRAND. \ 57 

now see what the $1,200 interest charge upon 
the start has grown to by its increase through the 
percentage rule in the reprisal system, and all of 
this taxation is taken from the consumers of the 
goods. 

If the $1,200 had not been added as interest, 
we find by the use of same percentages in the 
same position that the goods would have only cost 
$48,988, showing that the $1,200 had in its short 
travel grown to $2,082, an increase of $882.00. 

As there are millions of men in our country, 
who do not earn, upon an average 80 cents per 
day this little business operation has taken from 
the people the equivalent of 2,602^ days' labor, 
solely on account of the visible usury ; the con- 
cealed usury vastly more, which we will show in 
another chapter. 

And we ask the people who read this book to 
ponder over this usurous thieving that runs 
through all our commercial life and see if they 
cannot realize something of the causes that go to 
make the impoverishment of men. 

This little transaction involved only $28,800 
worth of goods in the start from the place of pro- 
duction, and if on this small sum so much robbery 
of men can be committed, what, then, is the 
amount involved in the largeness of our exchanges 
which amount to hundreds of billions of dollars ? 

And as you read further in this book of the 



58 TRUTH ERRAND. 

great usnrous drainage system that is constantly 
going on, and of some of the means by which it 
works, you may wake up and see the reasons why 
labor is so poorly paid and why 95 per cent, of 
all our business men make failures. 



CHAPTER XII. 

THE INTEREST AND REPRISAL COMBINATION. 

In the last chapter we said that the visible 
stealings made by usury were not all that usury 
took from the people on the little transactions 
mentioned therein. 

C, D & Co. bought those goods for A, B & Co. 
direct from the makers, and there was conse- 
quently no intervention of middle-men to swell 
their cost. 

The goods came from a large number of firms, 
as they embraced a large number of articles, but 
none of them were subject to any ''patent" tax 
or for any assessment on account of any secret 
used in any process of manufacture. 

Some of them came from large corporations 
with large capital, and some of them from small 
manufacturers with small capital ; but all of them 
without any resultant benefit to themselves were 
obliged to overcharge for their goods on account 



TRUTH ERRAND'. 59 

of the usurous taxation that met them through 
the interest and reprisal combination. 

The State and the city or town in which these 
manufacturers are located have interest to pay on 
loans, which they must meet by levies upon the land, 
the buildings and the machinery which these man- 
ufacturers use ; for the State makes the tools men 
employ in production, and those non-active factors 
they use in production, the land and the buildings, 
which produce nothing, and only furnish a place 
for activity to settle in, a perpetual injector of fresh 
taxation to be carried in an enlarged and enlarging 
amount in the output of these factories, because 
the State kneels at the shrine of the usurous god. 

The corporation must earn interest upon its cap- 
italization as well as profit on its products, for 
the stockholders have taken their money that was 
drawing " interest," or have hired that for which 
they must pay '"' interest," to establish those com- 
panies, and they declare that such amount must 
be returned to them before any profit can arise, 
and consequently interest is here made a prime fac- 
tor of expense to be added with the State taxation 
to the figures which make up the cost of the goods, 
and which, when the percentage is added, is to 
become the selling price to the wholesale dealer 
when ushered out by those factories. 

And the small manufacturer meets the rent 
lord who throws the State taxation and the inter- 



60 TRUTH EERAND. 

est taxation of his mortgages upon tliem in tlie 
form of a reprisal to which he adds his "profit ;" 
and the small manufacturer is oblisred to add this 
taxation to the cost of the goods before he can 
add a profit and fix the wholesale price of the 
goods. 

And the workers have suffered along the whole 
line on account of this heavy interest taxation, for 
the corporations have paid their workers less than 
what they should have received, and the small 
manufacturers have done the same thing ; and in 
all probability have also underpaid themselves, 
because interest taxation striking them in the form 
of repeatedly enlarged reprisal taxation has placed 
such a heavy load upon them that they could not 
bridge the yawning chasms the heavy taxation 
required them to cross in order to shift the taxa- 
tion upon others. 

And when w^e consider that the raw products 
which those manufacturers used were the finished 
products of others wdien carried to these manufac- 
turers' doors that had undergone a like system of 
taxation ; that transportation charges had entered 
into those goods several hundred times- in the 
assemblings of the different parts, and of the alter- 
ing agents to work upon them, and also know the 
fact that transportation charges are largely made up 
of interest taxation, we make a very conservative 
statement when we declare that this gathering of 



TRUTH ERRAND. 61 

goods to the value of $28,800 wenL into the hands 
of A, B & Co./o?' more than double ivhat they ivoidd 
have gone on a doubled labor loage for the loorkers 
that produced them if usury did not exist. 

But we will only halve that price, though God's 
own truth is in that statement, that men may not 
judge it extravagant ; for truth itself seems fic- 
tion to oppressed man when he is told of better 
things his mind has been trained to disbelieve 
possible of existence. 

And under the condition of usury non-existent, 
the commission firm, the jobber and the retailer 
could have worked for one-half of the charges they 
made and still have more than double the amount 
of money that would be their own. But we will 
figure the commission percentage as 3 per cent,, 
the jobbers' as 10 per cent, and the retailers' as 
20 per cent, and we have the net cost of these 
goods to the people at $18,106, instead of 
$51,070, a difference of $32,964, or enough to 
double the pay of 4,120 of those men who 
work at 80 cents per day to $1.60;. and it would 
benefit other workers by that amount of mouey 
which they would put into circulation for supplies 
they would need. 

And in the keeping of these immense amounts, 
as reckoned through all our exchanges, in the 
hands of those to whom they belong, instead of 
flooding them to usurous hands, prosperity would 



62 TRUTH ERRAND. 

reign in every home and smile on all the 
land. 

But to-day there is want and sadness all over 
the Nation ; for usury is supreme, and everywhere 
throughout all the land all activities of the 
people are embarrassed by its stealings. Every- 
thing against the labor wage is on an artificial 
basis. Eighty cents of every dollar's worth of 
exchanges are usurous insertions which means when 
properly stated that the peo|)le pay for the 
things of use 400 per cent, more than they ought, 
and for no other compensation than the establish- 
ment of a usurous class in a tyrannical master- 
ship over mankind at large. 

Shall foul usury conquer us all 
And the hopes of men for ages fall ; 
Or will the manhood of the Nation rise, 
To strike and see that foul usury dies ? 



CHAPTER XIII. 

LARGE LUMPS OF VISIBLE INTEREST TAXATION. 

Interest robs the human millions 
And gives the usurers money billions. 

That the skin game on humanity of interest has 
existed so long is due to the fact that previous to 
the present century it did not have the opportuni- 



TRUTH ERRAND. 63 

ties for extension it has ever since enjoyed in an 
ever enlarging degree. 

Previous to that time men were carried away 
with the specious argument that with a little 
money they could do this thing and do that and 
could well afford to pay for the use of money; 
but to-day the extension of usury taxation reaches 
beyond the limits of the legitimate divisions of 
any rewards earned in any honorable business in 
the demands it makes upon men, and instead 
of being an arrangement between the usurer and 
the man of business for sharing profits it has 
become the means of drawing into the usurers' 
hands four-fifths of the world's productive benefits. 

We are sending forth from our school houses 
every year hundreds of thousands of graduates, 
and we ought to have from them the diffusion of 
a little information for the people's benefit of the 
power for robbery the usurers possess, when they 
work the laws of percentage for their abstractions 
of interest. 

The usurer understands that power but the 
school graduate passes it by unnoticed as he takes 
his place and falls in with the habits of men in 
the struggles of the world, not for the reason 
that his knowledge of the percentage laws are 
less than those of the usurers, but for the reason 
that the usurer has had his mind centralized and 
trained to its strength in the potent and practical 



64 TRUTH ERRAND. 

possibilities they open up, while the school gradu- 
ate has been carefully trained to pay no heed to 
their power when used for the purpose of making 
abstractions from the people. 

But centralize the power of thought, not only 
of those school graduates, but of every person_ of 
intelligent reasoning powers upon the mighty 
wrongs being inflicted upon men by usury, and 
usury and the submittance of men to usury will 
be torn out from the habits of men. 

■ Then you will not have politicians of the calibre 
of those of the present day, great toads in small 
puddles of small ideas, dividing the people into 
hostile parties upon such foolish cries as " the 
tariff customs make you poor," or "the tariff 
customs alone make you rich." 

How loug shall American citizens, groaning 
beneath the heavy load of usurous taxation their 
government is permittiug to be heaped upon 
them, allow their intelligence to be insulted by 
the small political tricksters crying that "the 
foreigners pay the tariff's cutoms tax," as though 
the customs were the burden of taxation the peo- 
ple could make complaint of, when in reality it 
is only a very small and insignificant affair when 
compared to that colossus of robbery that, in the 
name of interest, plunders to poverty the people 
of the Nation. 

Here are a few lumps of visible taxation that 



TRUTH ERRAND. 65 

the tricksters do not call attention to, for even 
they, with all their brazen fronts, have not the 
temerity to say '' the foreigner pays the tax," pre- 
ferring to keep silent npon the matter and draw 
attention from them as taxing factors as much as 
possible. 

Among the larger items of our debts, as far as 
officially reported, are the following : 

National debt of the United States (U. S. 

Census, 1890), $ 891,960,104 

State and Municipal debt (U. S. Census, 

1890), 1,135,210,442 

Railway bonds on 171,866 miles railway, 

1892, (Poor's Manual, '93), . . . 5,463,611,204 
The average farm and home debt shown 

by tabulation of partial returns from 

counties distributed throughout the 

Union, is $1,288 for farm and f 924 for 

homes. If this average holds good for 

the United States there is an existing 

debt in force on the farms and homes 

of the United States occupied by owner 

(R. B. Porter, Supt. 11th Census, in North 

American Review, Vol. 153, page 618) of 2,500,000,000 
Mortgaged Indebtedness of Business Real- 
ty, Street Railways, Manufactories and 

Business enterprise (estimated from 

partial reports of 11th Census), . . 5,000,000,000 
Loans from 3,773 National Banks (Statis- 
tical Abstracts of the United States), . 2,153,769,806 
Loans from 5,579 State, Saving, Stock and 

Private Banks and Trust Companies 

(Statistical Abstracts of the U. S.), . 2,201,764,292 

If the same progressive ratio of increase is 
added to these figures that maintained from 1880 



66 TRUTH ERRAND. 

to 1890, over 5,000 million should now be added 
to the items above given. 

These figures are taken from Coin's Financial 
School, and show, for the above items, an interest- 
bearing debt of |24,346,o] 5,848, for which the in- 
terest at 5 per cent, would be |1, 217, 315, 848 ; 
6 per cent., $1,459,778,950; 7 per cent., $1,704,- 
242,109, or the equivalent of nearly seven mil- 
lions (6,816,958) persons' wages yearly, who 
work 250 days each year at one dollar per day. 

For the fiscal year ending June 30, 1895 the 
United States currency was in amount claimed 
$1,655,835,674. For the amount in actual circu- 
lation read article from Dye's Government Coun- 
terfeit Detector. 

Is it any wonder that laborers have to struggle 
for an existence and that employers seek to pay 
labor as little as possible — that upon this beautiful 
green earth, wdiich God so richly supplied with 
means to cover mens' wants, so many have to 
suffer ? 

Couple the foregoing taxation with the larger 
amounts that are interwoven more indirectly with 
it in all the varied transactions of life, and which 
are constantly being compounded by the reprisals 
in all their cris-crossings a"nd inward and outward 
movements, and then contrast the amount of gov- 
ernment circulation and you may realize the fact 
that if every dollar and every cent of that money 



TRUTH EERAND. 67 

the United States provides for the people could be 
thrown into one heap it would pay for only a few 
weeks the amount of the usurous taxation that is 
going on in the United States. 

The great Napoleon said: "When I look over 
the deadly possibilities contained in those interest 
tables, my wonder is why interest has not eaten 
up the world before this." 

Now the world has its great Napoleons of 
finance, and mankind are commencing to enjoy 
the "deadly possibilities" contained in interest 
taxation and the laws that uphold it. 

And not only are the workers and the people of 
the Nation in general suffering from the schemes 
of these "Napoleons," but thousands who have 
gathered accumulations and sought to make them 
bring in "income," by investing in corporations 
of great revenue gathering capacity, have learned 
and are constantly learning that these great 
Napoleons can make these corporations turn over 
to themselves the money derived from the invest- 
ments these parties have made, as guaranteed 
interest claims of first consideration in the 
secured mortages and bonds, which they induce 
the management they are represented in, to plas- 
ter over the property, and, when they have sucked 
up the life blood of the corporation's financial 
resources, the wiping out process is completed by 
the reorganization, which leaves the Napoleons in 



TRUTH ERRAJ^D. 



full command to watch for and grab in new vic- 
tims to plunder. 

Let men who believe that they have some 
rights upon earth greater than the privilege of 
working for interest thieves study attentively 
the following table of the power of compounded 
interest to impoverish a people : 

00 for ] 00 years compounded ^t 



ith int. at. 1 p. r. amounts to $2.75 


" 


' "2 '' 


7.25 




' "2i " 


11.75 




' " .3 " 


19.25 




' "4 " 


50.50 




; i( 5 u 


131.50 




• "6 " 


340.00 




' "7 " 


868.00 




' "8 " 


2,203.00 




' " 9 " 


5,543.00 



Mark well the fact that while compounded 
interest at 3 per cent, amounts to $19.25 on a 
single dollar, on double that rate of interest, or 6 
per cent., it amounts to $340.00; at 42 per cent, 
to $81.25; at 9 per cent, to $5,543.00, and as the 
percentages rise there is a startling increase in 
power for robbery. 

Let every sensible man stop and reflect on what 
good is accomplished by usury's confiscations, men 
eating men like savages, for the benefit of a few 
individuals to reap into their hands the wealth of 
the world. 



TRUTH EREAND. 69 



CHAPTER XIV. 

THE INTEREST MONGERS' GRASP UPON THE WORLD. 

We hear the remark from one of those men 
whose mind has been educated to look upon 
interest as a divine commission for man to rob 
man when he has the opportunity, " this is not the 
only land where people have to pay interest." 

"It is true! and pity 'tis 'tis true!" 

And what are the "rights" that people enjoy 
in other lands ? 

'Tis the "right" to work and tug, and tug and 
work for class aggrandizement, the privilege to be 
kicked and cuffed, to go half clad, half fed, and 
to be spit upon for doing so and being such. 

Jay Cooke, the New York banker of memorable 
fame, taught, ere Jay Cooke went down, that a 
National Debt was a national blessing. 

And here is a showing of a part of the grand 
"blessing" some of the nations of the Old World 
are working fo':*. 

Fifty nations are in debt to the amount of 
thirty billions of dollars, and in these figures a 



70 TRUTH ERRAND. 

rich field is presented for some of our great politi- 
cal economists to delve in and speculate upon 
how many thousands of years it will take the 
people of those lands of human drudgery, with the 
usurers sitting on top of them, to earn enough to 
make themselves free by getting ahead of the 
usurous taxation and schemes for the enlargement 
and perpetuation of the debts. 

They can start with England, which section of 
the British Empire is said to pay the larger wage, 
and figure that body down until they reach India, 
where the worker is allowed to get six or eight 
weeks' living out of the crops he labored so hard 
to raise, and the pawn-broking English shark 
grabs the remainder, and kindly turns around 
and sells the laborer, on the security of a 
mortgage on the next season's crop, enough to 
keep him alive and give him seed for the plant- 
ing, upon an interest charge that will swell his 
claim to such proportions as will bring about a 
repetition of the same conditions. 

Then they can change the order of their travel- 
ing and go to Austria-Hungary, where labor 
in many sections is not worth more than the 
equivalent of eighty cents per week in our 
money, and then reach over to the better paid 
labor in France and Germany, and, as the deduc- 
tions they make can only be speculative and harm- 
less, they will be entitled to more respect and do 



TRUTH ERRAND. 71 

less damage to mankind than they are now doing 
by misleading many men, through the foolish 
endeavor to stop the progress of the world, in 
sending forth "new" tricky ideas to make the 
usurers' old promulgations look respectable. 

Let men think of the enslaving powers of these 
figures, which represent only the national and not 
the private debts of the people of those coun- 
tries. 

Debt of Gt. Britain and Ireland. .$3,350,719,563 

" Austria-Hungary 2,866,339,539 

" Italy 2,324,826,329 

" Russia 3,491,018,074 

'' Spain ,. . 1,251,453,696 

" France 4,446,793,398 

" India 881,063,592 

" Bavaria 335,503,105 

''■ Turkey 821,000,000 

'' Prussia 1,109,384,127 

These nations are only cited from the list of 
those that are in debt to show what men have to 
live in those lands in the way of a "national bless- 
ing;" and if we were able to show the private 
amounts subject to interest taxation we would 
be able to appreciate the world blessing show- 
ered on humanity by the usurers. 

And this is the "Peace Establishment " in some 



72 TRUTH ERRAND. 

of those nations that keep the toilers from mak- 
ing vigorous protests: 

Germany 545,136 men 

France 567,464 

Russia 1,112,684 

Italy 220,000 

Great Britain 139,000 

Turkey 189,165 

Spain 143,197 

Austria-Hungary 344,450 

And here is a list of their registered paupers 
from their own counting : 

Great Britain and Ireland 887,580 

Russia 107,127 

Germany 320,000 

Austria 290,000 

France 285,000 

Italy 275,000 

These are the registered paupers, and does not 
include the millions that those governments do 
not take care of, and who are so poor in most 
cases that they have no place to rest their heads 
and very seldom any idea of where their meals 
are coming from, except as charity supplies them. 

The other nations of the Old World do not 
register their paupers in any systematic manner, 
if at all, and they may be conjectured from India, 
where most of the people are virtually enslaved 



TRUTPI ERRAND. 73 

under such a despotism that they are not much 
better than paupers, to the other lands that have 
a limitation — God knows where ! 



CHAPTER XV. 

"a rose by another name would smell as 

SWEET." 

What we call interest to-day is only that same 
old system of robbery which, from its late change 
of name, runneth through all the centuries to days 
that preceded the writings of the Old Testament 
under the name of usury. 

Until these late days through all time usury 
was considered an infamous crime, hated and des- 
pised of all men and the church, the usurer being 
outlawed, hunted, whipped and often put to death. 

From an old song we have the axiom, " A rose 
by any other name would smell as sweet." In old 
usury and modern interest we have a distinction of 
terms without a difference, the poisonous sheen by 
another name. 

The Christian Church always waged a bitter 
warfare against usury for all the centuries of its 
existence, until these latter days when the usur- 
ers securing a cha.nge of name for their dealings 
succeeded in having the sickening stench of ages 



74 TRUTH ERRAND. 

declared a sweet perfume, whose exhalations se- 
cures the usurer mstallation as a beneficial mem- 
ber of society. 

To-day we have Christian Churches of all 
denominations resorting to usury to secure an in- 
come, and in the "livery of Heaven" they serve 
the devil by taking to themselves the stealings 
from men; and the nerve that some of these disci- 
ples of God display in coolness of purpose would 
freeze to paralysis, as with ice, the nerve of the 
thief who limits his abstractions upon men to the 
confines of his visit and its opportunities. 

The apologist for this dipping into usury by 
the Christian Church, who does not like it, but 
does not wish to condemn the Church, says : " The 
Church has grown worldly, but it is still the best 
institution that we have." 

But why has the Christian Church grown 
worldly? Is it because the love of plunder has 
grown so universal that desire for easy gain, 
overcoming conscience as to method, has spread 
to the Christian Church and made pelf, instead 
of virtue, the sustaining pillars of the Christian 
religion ? 

The Christian Church has no excuse in resort- 
ing to usurous practices for its sustainment, for 
they are in direct contravention of its principles, 
and if its ministers or boards of directors are 
inclined to reaping gain by resort to infamous 



TRUTH ERRAND. 75 

usury, then from the humble communicants 
should come the command that will make these 
men, who defile the Temple of God, step down 
and out, and give place to worship instead of 
profanation of God. 



CHAPTER XVI. 

THE GREAT USUROUS COMBINATIONS OPERATING 
IN THE AMERICAN REPUBLIC. 

An indisj^utable condition of ill confronts the 
people of the American Republic in the fact that 
their rulers, their gods of supremacy on earth, are 
now centralized in the great usury combinations 
operating in London and New York, with ramiti- 
cations reaching and working throughout the 
American Union. 

Abraham Lincoln warned you of the dangers 
that were before you, and told you that the dan- 
gers of the Civil War were nothing to those that 
you must yet confront, and that he feared for his 
country that " all of liberty would be lost." 

But you heed not his admonitions, for they are 
on a subject you have never given the attention 
it deserves, and, for want of that reflection, 
have become rattled through the various causes 
alleged to be responsible for the conditions under 
which you suffer. 



7b TRUTH ERRAND. 

Daily reading your political papers you do not 
realize, for you do not wish to believe that the is- 
sues in your political campaigns have been and 
are guided by a band of financial conspirators in 
London with partners and well fed agents in all 
American cities. 

They plan to live under either party, although 
for the furtherance of their design they prefer one 
over the other. Their agents mix in and feed 
both political parties with money so as to be bet- 
ter able to shape things as they will, and the 
Limited Democracy of the United States is as 
easily a managed affair as the Limited Monarchy 
of Great Britain is willingly subservient. 

It is not a King George with the direct taxa- 
tion which worked up the ire of our forefathers 
which is crowding us all to-day. His taxation 
was visible to all, and they took the tea with his 
stamps of taxation upon the chests and threw 
them into the waters of Boston Bay. 

The impoverishing taxation that to-day con- 
fronts us is not that of an established general gov- 
ernment, but is one levied by corporations and 
individuals w^orking in combination, and singly, 
who exercise a greater despotism in their dealings 
with men and impose heavier taxation than any 
general government would dare to undertake, or 
would long reign if it did in any land of intelli- 
gent people; and yet these private despotisms are 



TKUTH ERRAND. 77 

SO intrenched and empowered by our bad legisla- 
tion as to be able to employ the courts of our 
country to carry out their mandates for fleecing, 
degrading, and impoverishing our people. 

It is not the great corporations who enter the 
industrial field for the purpose of manufacturing 
or of agriculture that we are to fear. These are 
the outgrowths from the conditions that usury 
has forced upon the country, and stand in that 
long line of unimpeachable testimony of the state 
of things which usury has brought about, for 
usQry has impoverished the people of the country 
to such a condition that the markets where indus- 
try seeks to make its exchanges are constantly 
crying for lower and lower prices, and these 
industrial combinations have heen organized in 
resistance to such call. 

Destroy usury and the great thieves that are 
preying upon the Nation will disappear, and these 
industrial combinations for putting up the prices 
will break up, for the potent reason that they 
contain within themselves the positive conditions 
that will work their own impotency and disinte- 
gration. 

Give them no special favors, prevent their con- 
trolling the raw materials, and provide fair and 
equal transportation services for all, and in almost 
every line these combinations enter, outside indi- 
vidual competition will knock them down ; for 



78 TRUTH ERRAND. 

every movement beyond a certain limitation will 
mean increased cost of production and greater 
exposure for attack with still less power for defense. 

Even now, of all the great syndicates and com- 
binations of this nature that have been formed, 
some of which had their birth through fear of 
an approaching bankruptcy by the projectors 
who conspired their existence, there are but 
very few not controlling a patent monopoly or 
a grasp upon tlie raw material that have been 
able to make, upon a bona-fide business base, 
any remarkable showing upon their capitaliza- 
tion; while some have had to resort to Wall 
street methods of stock gambling, or other swind- 
ling devices to raise their dividends. 

It was not against this class of corporations, 
who would produce and live more honestly if they 
could, that Abraham Lincoln felt alarm, for they 
have come into existence since the days he was on 
earth ; but it was against those blood-sucking in- 
terest-gathering corporations in the shape of 
banks, money dealers and railroad corporations, 
whose great business is the juggling of those forces 
for plunder that compel agriculture, manu- 
facture and commerce, to part with the wealth 
they create through usurous ensnarements. 

You know the bitter, bitter trials you have 
gone through. If that light which comes from 
what Patrick Henry called the Lamp of Experi- 



TEUTH ERRAND. 79 

ence has not made it visible to you that the 
usurers caused the two great financial panics and 
many years of business depression during the past 
quarter of a century, then you are too dull to 
realize what has squeezed you and plundered you 
right and left and causes the so-called White 
Slavery of to-day. 

Let no man who values the liberty of his coun- 
try and the maintenance of human rights throw 
aside those words of one of the greatest men in 
our history; he who presided as Chief Executive 
of our Republic through the darkest and wildest 
hours we ever knew, when the advice of frightened 
friend was as dangerous a thing to handle as the 
open foe before him to confront. 

These are the warning words of Abraham 
Lincoln : 

"Let them beware of surrendering a political 
power they now have and which if surrendered 
will surely be used to close the door against such 
as they, and to fix new disabilities and burdens 
upon them till all of liberty shall he lost.'" 

"I see in the near future a crisis approaching 
that unnerves me, and causes me to tremble for 
the safety of my country. As a result of the War 
corporations have been enthroned, and an era of 
corruption in high places will follow, and the 
money power of the country will endeavor to pro- 



80 ' TRUTH EERAND. 

long its reign by working upon the prejudices of 
the people, until all wealth is aggregated into a 
few hands, and the Republic is destroyed." 

And the money power did conspire and got 
your small and partisan statesmen to whoop 
up the little matters that your prejudices were 
nursing, and stir you up to such excitement about 
them that, under the imbecility of your petty 
thoughts, they could fix the chains that have since 
commenced to wind their enslaving links around 
you and against which you make such feeble 
opposition. 

When the Republic fails to protect the people, 
though its machinery runs on just the same, the 
Republic is destroyed. 

Remember the warning words of Abraham 
Lincoln : " The money power will work upon and 
prolong your prejudices and centralize your wealth 
into their hand. 

Till all of liberty shall be lost ! 
Till all of liberty shall be lost! " 



CHAPTER XVII. 

CAN THE WORLD GET ALONG WITHOUT USURERS? 

No doubt there are many people who believe 
honestly that the world cannot get along without 
usurous taxation. 



TRUTH ERRAND. 81 

They reason that it is necessary for men to get 
money to carry out enterprises, and that men 
witli money will not lend their property without 
getting an equivalent for it. And they further 
justify it on the ground that "money makes 
mone}^," always using this expression to clinch 
their arguments. 

That the world can get along without the 
necessity of those levies upon individual by individ- 
ual in the form of 'interest" is not only possible, 
but imperatively necessary that it shall do so in 
the interests of humanity, who will immeasurably 
gain thereby in all directions. 

If civilization cannot throw down the institu- 
tions that were nursed by a semi-civilization only 
for purposes of robbery; if governments cannot 
employ their legitimate prerogatives for the pro- 
tection of the people ; if the usurer is so supreme 
that the artificial prices of men's exchanges by 
the interest insertion cannot be changed, then 
civilization must be pushed on until it comes into 
control. 

Many things that men look upon through their 
ignorance as being beyond the accomplishment of 
men have come to be established facts, and have 
shown so much advantage over things they dis- 
placed as to create wonder how the world got 
along with the old. 

When Columbus sought to get means to find a 



82 TRUTH ERRAND. 

west passage to the Indies many of the wise men 
of the time ridiculed his plans inquiring: "How is 
it possible for people to live on the other side of 
a round world with their heels upward and their 
heads downward, or for trees to grow with their 
branches downward and their roots upward?" 

And others thought that even if a ship should 
succeed in reaching India by sailing west it would 
never be able to return, for the roundness of the 
earth would form a kind of mountain, up which it 
would be impossible to sail. 

But Columbus and his followers sailed, and 
while they did not reach India they did finally 
discover the continent of America, and here to- 
day, in its northern part, the hope of humanity 
centers — for this is the land that is going to work 
out and fight out to victory the emancipation of 
man from the bondage of slavery. 

People who do not conceive how it is possible 
that the business of life can be carried on without 
interest-taxation should reflect for a moment how 
the country could get along if all the money hold- 
ers with their money were driven across or into 
the sea. 

Many people fail to realize the fact that while 
money in one form or another is a vital necessity 
for a nation it is no part of its vital w^ealth. 

Could a conspiracy be formed that would be 
powerful enough to strip the nation of its entire 



TRUTH ERRAND. 83 

money to-morrow, by taking not only that which 
has always been open for export if its commodity 
value grew greater than its measuring one, but 
also such money as has never been liable to 
removal, on account of its measuring value always 
exceeding its commodity one, they could not beg- 
gar the nation, nor do more than momentarily 
embarass it by compelling an awaiting the crea- 
tion and distribution of a new supply, which the 
people can always issue if they maintain and 
make operative their inherent rights. 

With a proper appreciation of those facts, we 
must be more than stupid if we fail to realize that 
it is within the power of the people in this respect 
to legislate good or ill upon themselves, dethrone 
or more firmly enthrone the usurer, and make 
good times or bad times by stimulating or depress- 
ing the activities of men. 

And what a grand revolution will be wrought 
in the condition of the masses of the people when 
thousands of millions of dollars of annual taxa- 
tion imposed by the usurers upon them, shall be 
done away with, and agriculture, manufacture, 
and commerce, ceasing to be assessed by, or to 
continue as collectors for the usurers, find before 
them larger and unimpoverished markets. 

And the poor human weaklings of to-day^ who 
under their non-resistance to the interest taxers 
have become imbued with the idea that people 



84 TRUTH ERRAND. 

would drop off tbe face of the earth, through 
want of means to hold themselves thereon if 
interest was abolished, will become more interest- 
ing figures in the history of the weakness of men, 
on account of the sufferings they submitted to 
when they had great opportunities of acquiring 
intelligence enough to make them know better, 
than have become the scoffers who sought to block 
the expedition of Columbus, by inquiring how 
people could live on the other side of a round 
earth, with their feet upward and their heads 
downward. 

" There's a fount about to stream, 
There's a light about to beam, 
There's a warmth about to glow, 
There's a floAver about to blow, 
There's a midnight darkness 
Changing into gray, 
Men of thought, and men of action, 
Clear the way ! 

Aid the dawning tongue and pen ; 
Aid it hopes of honest men ; 
Aid it paper ; aid it type ; 
Aid it, for the hour is ripe ; 
And our earnest must not slacken 

Into play. 
Men of thought, and men of action ! 
Clear the way ! 
Lo ! the right's about to conquer ; 
Clear the way ! 

With the right shall many more 
Enter smiling at the door ; 
With the giant wrong shall fall 
Many others, great and small, 
That for ages long have held us 
For their prey. 
Men of thought, and men of action, 

Clear the way ! " — Mackay. 



TRUTH ERRAND. 85 

CHAPTER XVIIT. 

THE GOLD BASIS AND THE PANIC OF 1819. 

In 1818 the United States Bank with its eight- 
een branches had made discounts to the amount 
of forty-three millions of dollars and had only 
two millions of dollars in specie to support the 
issue. 

Strenuous efforts were made to increase the 
specie reserve, and at a cost of eight hundred 
thousand dollars as the expense for gathering it, 
seven millions of dollars of bullion was brought 
from abroad, but the scheming Bank of England 
wanted it and juggled it into her vaults. 

Congress questioning the bank's solvency com- 
pelled the bank to resort to vigorous measures, 
and a contraction of its notes of a violent nature 
set in ruining men right and left. 

Banks were rocky everywhere, and they scram- 
bled for gold in every direction, but gold was not 
to be had. 

A few banks in the South maintained "gold 
payments," but people grew tired of their slow- 
ness of movement in paying it out. In many 
banks if a person took a note calling for one, 
two, five or ten dollars and asked for gold he 



86 ■ TRUTH ERRAND. 

was obliged to wait until five directors were pres- 
ent, when before them and the cashier, at an 
expense of $1.37 on each note, he was required to 
make oath that the bill was his own, and that he 
was not an agent for any one. In those days the 
Southern bankers knew how to make a little of 
the "sound basis of money" stretch out a long 
way when called upon to redeem their notes. 

The condition of the country was bad every- 
where, for gold, the usurer's dear old sheeny god of 
honest money, had sneaked away, as it ever did, 
and ever will, at the approach of a crisis. 

All over the land in groups could be seen a hun- 
dred men all having a first lien mortgage on the 
same gold dollar, hunting to find that little 
amount of the usurers' "proper basis of money." 

Let all men who believe in usury, and gold as 
the "proper basis" of honest money, read of the 
condition of things as reported by a committee of 
the Senate of Pennsylvania on the 20th day of 
February, 1820: — 

" In ascertaining the extent of the public distress 
your committee had no difficulties to encounter. 
Members of the legislature from various quarters 
of the State, have been consulted in relation to 
this subject, and their written testimony in 
answer to interrogations submitted to them by 
the committee, has agreed, with scarcely a single 
exception, on all material points. With such 



TRUTH ERRAND. 87 

respectable weight of evidence, added to that 
which has been derived from the prothonotaries, 
recorder and sheriffs of the different counties, 
from intercourse with numerous private citizens 
residing in different parts of the State, as well as 
from the various petitions presented to the legis- 
lature, your committee can safely assert that a 
distress unexampled in our country since the 
period of independence prevails throughout the 
commonwealth. 

This distress exhibits itself under the various 
forms of 

1. Ruinous sacrifices of landed property at 
sheriffs' sales, whereby, in many cases, lands and 
houses have been sold at less than one-half, a 
third or a fourth of their former value, thereby 
depriving of their homes, and of the fruits of 
laborious years, a vast number of our industrious 
farmers, some of whom have been driven to seek, 
in the uncultivated forests of the West, that shel- 
ter of which they have been deprived in their 
native State. 

2. Forced sales of merchandise, household 
goods, farming stocks and utensils, at prices far 
below the cost of production, by v/liich many fam- 
ilies have been deprived of the common necess- 
aries of life, and of the implements of their trade. 

3. Numerous bankruptcies and pecuniary em- 
barrassment of every description, as well among 



88 TRUTH ERRAND. 

the agricultural and manufacturing as the mer- 
cantile classes. 

4. A general scarcity of money throughout 
the country, which renders it almost impos- 
sible for the husbandman or other owners of real 
estate to borrow at a usurous rate, and where 
landed security of the most indubitable character 
is offered as a pledge. A similar difficulty of 
procuring on loans had existed in the metropolis 
previous to October last, but has since been par- 
tially removed. 

5. A general suspension of labor, the only 
legitimate source of wealth, in our cities and 
towns, by which thousands of our most useful 
citizens are rendered destitute of the means of 
support, and are reduced to the extremity of pov- 
ert}^ and dispair. 

6. An almost entire cessation of the usual 
circulation of commodities and a consequent stag- 
nation of business, which is limited to the mere 
purchase and sale of the necessaries of life, and of 
such articles of consumption as are absolutely 
required by the season. 

7. A universal suspension of all manufac- 
turing operations by which, in addition to the dis- 
missal of the numerous laborers heretofore engaged 
therein, who can find no other employment, the 
public loses the revenue of the capital invested in 
machinery and buildings. 



TRUTH ERRAND. 89 

8. Usurous extortions, whereby corporations 
instituted for banking, insurance and other pur- 
poses, in violation of law, possess themselves of 
the products of industry without granting an 
equivalent. 

9. The overflowing of our prisons with insol- 
vent debtors, most of whom are confined for trifling 
sums, whereby the community loses a portion of 
its effective labor, and is compelled to support 
families by charity who have been deprived of 
their protectors. 

10. Numerous law suits upon the dockets of 
our courts and of our justices of the peace, which 
lead to extravagant costs and loss of a great por- 
tion of valuable time. 

11. Vexatious losses arising from the deprecia- 
tion and fluctuation in the value of bank notes, 
the impositions of brokers and the frauds of coun- 
terfeiters. 

12. A general inability in a community to meet 
with punctuality the payment of debts even for 
family expenses, which is experienced as well by 
those who are wealthy in property as by those who 
have hitherto relied upon their current engage- 
ments. With such a mass of evils to oppress 
them, it cannot be wondered at that the people 
should be dispirited, and that they should look to 
their representatives for relief. Their patient en- 
durance of suffering, which can only be imag- 



90 • TRUTH ERRAND. 

ined by those who have habitually intermingled 
with them at their homes and by their firesides, 
merits the commendation of the legislature and 
prefers a powerful claim to their interference." 

If such an official report were made to-day to a 
State legislature the committee making it would 
be quickly denounced as anarchists by the large 
newspapers of the country, which are all under 
usurous control. 

People who think usury is right want to study 
the results of the taxation and control of the peo- 
ple's prosperity and welfare by usurous hands, and 
they may come to the conclusion that the preven- 
tion of men from benefiting by the capital God 
has given them to work with is not only a crime 
against man but a blasphemy of God. 

This official picture of the conditions existing 
in the 1819 panic, so far as it goes, is true of all 
panics, but to the latter ones you must add har- 
rowing tales of immorality, crimes, suicides, mur- 
ders, men and women trading their virtues for an 
existence, tramps, beggars, sudden deaths through 
heart-failure and painful ones through inability of 
response to nature's demands if you wish to truth- 
fully realize what the fat-bellied old usurers have 
wrought in these days of modern Christian civili- 
zation. 

Count up the years of duration of panics usur- 



TRUTH ERRAND. 91 

ers have made in this country in the last seventy- 
five years, and you can name their number, but 
you cannot count up or realize the millions of peo- 
ple that have suffered robbery, poverty, hardships 
and death through usury. 

In 1809 a panic ; in 1814 a panic ; in 1819 a 
panic; in 1825 a panic ; in 1837-39-41 panic; in 
1857 a panic; in 1873 a pauic; in 1893 a panic; 
while great business depressions have intervened, 
lasting sometimes two or three years and every one 
of them the result of usury or usurous schemes. 

What is the end of government? — is it to pro- 
mote the welfare and secure the prosperity of the 
people ? — or is it the creation of a favored class to 
hand the people over to., with privileges and 
powers to confiscate to themselves the people's 
wealth ? 



CHAPTER XIX. 

THE SPECIE BASIS AND PANIC OF 1873. 

Let those men who believe there should be 
honor among men, that love their country and 
desire to have it uphold no institutions that 
inflict wrongs and poverty upon the people, study 
with a determination to reach the truth the 
effects that interest taxation has had on the 
nation for the last three-quarters of a century of 



92 TRUTH ERRAND. 

its existence, fairly allowing the first quarter of 
the century for the rounding of the government 
into directable form. 

If they study the country's history correctly, 
not its fourth of July orations and the fire-works, 
but the great financial crises, and money panics, 
that have so often impoverished it, they will find 
that all the great disasters of business disturb- 
ance and money panics have been caused by inter- 
est taxation, either in the fullness of its devasta- 
tion, or in the schemes of the usurers to enlarge 
their grip upon the people by securing an increase 
of their power for making abstractions. 

And it is well to notice that during the period 
of the extension of usury, and its formation as an 
exact science for gathering the world's wealth, 
the specie basis system has been a great trump 
card, with appearing and disappearing spots, in 
the bunco game of fleecing humanity. 

Originally the Bank of England employed the 
specie basis system for the purpose of gaining 
favor with the people, but it soon discovered that 
it was a powerful agent for centralizing the 
wealth of the many in a few hands by the oppor- 
tunities it presented for interest taxation, by 
using it as a base on which to fabricate a duplica- 
tion of instruments for interest extortion. 

The usurer always declares for money with a 
commodity value. In olden days the usurers, 



TRUTH ERRAIn^D. 93 

owing to the danger they were constantly exposed 
to on account of their business, sought for some- 
thing portable, and as gold and silver was every- 
where salable for purposes of ornamentation they 
naturally selected them. 

And for centuries the usurers declared gold and 
silver to be divinely appointed for purposes of 
money, but latterly the supply of both metals 
becoming larger than they wanted to use as a 
basis of money, they decided to advocate only one 
and threw silver down, conspiring to have all 
nations declare gold the " honest basis " for 
money. 

The dangerous nature of the usurers' character 
was painfully manifest during our struggles in 
the civil war, and caused at times the officials in 
charge of the government more embarrassment 
and discouragement than all the other factors 
unitedly that they had to deal with in the con- 
duct of the war. Animated only by their love of 
gain they sought and succeeded in prolonging the 
period and multiplying the cost of the war, con- 
spiring in and out of Congress to break down the 
government securities so as to get them cheap, 
and when the war was over and the soldiers paid 
off they turned around and made the government 
securities, bought from thirty-five to fifty cents 
upon the dollar, as dear as possible, by holding 
them so much above their par value as to make 



94 TRUTH ERRAND. 

the government in its efforts to redeem them for 
the purpose of refunding at a lower rate of inter- 
est, pay compensating damages, by demanding a 
premium upon their written face for the sliorten- 
ing of the time they were to draw the larger per 
cent., although on those same securities they had 
drawn in interest nearly as much as they had 
paid for them. 

Nor were they satisfied with the bleeding of 
the government. The people's independence must 
be broken down in order to control them, so that, 
henceforth, they must become workers for the 
usurers' benefit instead of their own. 

The large volume of money in circulation was 
a barrier to the usurers' schemes, and they decided 
its great bulk should be replaced by interest- bear- 
ing bonds, and the reduced volume of money left 
at such a low point in amount that all kinds 
of business should kneel at their shrine and pay 
tribute. 

Avowing themselves as only desirous of getting 
the financial system of the country upon a "sound 
basis of honest money" they wined, dined, and pat- 
ronizingly flattered Hugh McCullough, the Secre- 
tary of the Treasury, and a few members of the 
American Congress, until they unmanned them 
and made them push through those financial meas- 
ures the usurers had shaped as their chosen ones 
for the taxation of the American people. 



TRUTH ERRAND. 95 

Abraham Lincoln died on the fifteenth day of 
April, 1865 from the woimds inflicted by Booth, 
and it left easy work for the usurers in carrying 
out their plots to make the United States a greater 
field than the world has ever known for usurous 
occupancy. 

Evidenced by indisputable facts that the loyal 
section of the Nation had grown rich while carry- 
ing on the greatest war of modern times, and that 
the resources of the country were great and inex- 
haustible, and that a reunited country would pro- 
duce vast wealth the usurers left no stone un- 
turned that would aid in the consummation of 
their desire. 

Yelping politicians shouting the glories of the 
Republican party were in control in Congress. 
More gifted in waving the "bloody shirt " and fir- 
ing the Northern heart with wild tales about that 
great Southern bugaboo, the Ku Klux Klan, than 
in shaping that wise financial legislation which 
the situation demanded, the cute old usurers were 
not slow in seeing their opportunities, and by 
helping to keep those passions stirred up, and the 
yelling going on, that which they could not have 
done openly and with exposed end, they did se- 
cretly, sneakingly, and with concealed purpose. 

It must be remembered that during the last 
years of the war, and for a few years thereafter, 
business flourished on every hand. When balked 



96 TRUTH ERRAND. 

and robbed by usiirous hands the government 
determinedly brought forth the Greenbacks, bid- 
ding the usurers defiance, it put into the hands of 
the people an actuate by which they could employ 
their capital and set the wheels of industry in 
motion; and so steadily and rapidly did those 
wheels revolve that the Nation made riches faster 
than the wastes of war were destroying its wealth, 
and when the war was over and the armies were 
disbanded, the return of a million men to labor 
disturbed no enterprise, but gave all acceleration 
as they filed in to increase the productive forces 
of the Nation. 

With the cordiality of the spider that invited 
the fly to his cozy parlor, the usurers advised 
the lessening of the rates of interest the Ameri- 
can people were paying on their bonds by the 
refunding of them into those of a lower rate, run- 
ning for a long term, well knowing that for all 
that was in their hands they could compel the pay- 
ment of a premium to compensate for the exchange. 

With the extension of the bonds, the money 
of the American people turned into interest bear- 
ing bonds, and the doubly usurous output of the 
national banks taking the place of that money, 
reinforced by the usurers' well-known private sub- 
stitutes, American energy and capital handicapped 
and taxed in all directions would be compelled to 
kneel at usury's altar. 



TRUTH ERRAND. 97 

Those sharp old usurers of London and New 
York always work with a matured plan, and 
never put any puppets upon the stage to dance 
except to further their purpose and conceal the 
design. 

The London newspapers dwelt upon the uncer- 
tainties of American finance and the lack of an 
honest basis for money, and the New York news- 
papers and those of other American cities explained 
to the people that if the United States had only 
a " sound basis " of money " how good American 
securities and bonds would be all over the world." 

As a preliminary for getting down to a specie 
basis at the usurers' behests, a large part of the 
money of the country was turned into interest 
bearing bonds, and the rest so much contracted 
that business men were obliged to resort to giv- 
ing and accepting private notes and other individ- 
ual acknowledgements of indebtedness, and fly to 
the usurers and ask for their favors. 

The usurers were happy. They sounded praises 
for the government on all the passing winds. 

Henceforth the agricultural, manufacturing and 
commercial activities of the American people 
were to be carried on mainly for the usurers' bene- 
fit. The next enlargement of the circulating 
medium of the country had only to be held in 
check and the usurers' control woidd be complete. 

But in a short time the business men were in a 



98 TRUTH ERRAND. 

maze. They were paying and paying interest 
taxation. The profits of their business were slip- 
ping away from tliem — sometliing was wrong! 
Business seemed to be going on all around them! 
They looked to themselves in the hope of finding 
something for the correction — to their product to 
see if it was what it ought to be — to their cus- 
tomers to see if they had suddenly become 
stricken with freaks. 

Interest was getting in its deadly work. The 
usurers w^ere supreme. A small volume of money 
and the laws of the land enthroned them as the 
ruling power over a Nation that boasted freedom 
as its possession. 

With no sounds of warning, no shocks of calam- 
ities, or hesitation in the markets, the business 
men of the Nation in 1873 were brought face to 
face with the fact that a great panic had set in. 

Unable to follow the mesh-work of threads that 
had ensnared them to the hands that set the traps, 
the business men furtively glanced at one another 
with askance as to what caused the other's em- 
barrassment, while the sharp old interest-pullers 
looking on with their forefingers at the side of their 
nose, complacently volunteered the information 
that the prevailing misfortune was due to too 
much speculation and over-trading, but " all those 
that had some good securities they ivould help out 
very reasonably '' 



TRUTH ERRAND. 99 

During the years 1868 and 1869 more than one 
thousand millions of dollars of currency notes were 
destroyed and gold-interest long term bonds sub- 
stituted in their place. Not only was it the 
scheme of the usurers to get rid of the interest 
bearing currency that was used in the larger tran- 
sactions of trade and financial exchange, by their 
conversion into gold-interest bonds, but they sought 
to get rid of the Greenback circulation as fast as 
they could, and up to July, 1868, more than sev- 
enty million of dollars were destroyed, as it would 
all have been did not Congress under the pressure 
of public protest pass a law in 1868 declaring 
"• that from and after its passage the authority of 
the Secretary of the Treasury to make any reduc- 
tion of the currency by retiring or cancelling 
United States' notes (Greenback) shall be and is 
hereby repealed." 

From 1870 to 1872 one hundred and fourteen 
millions more of currency went out of circulation 
in furtherance of the usurers' plans. The follow- 
ing tables tell their own story: 

Amount of money, currency and circulating me- 
dium of the United States, September 1, 1865 : 



100 TRUTH ERRAND. 

United States Notes $ 433,160,569 

Fractional Currency 26,344,742 

Kational Bank Xotes 185,000,000 

Compound Interest Legal Tender Notes . . 217,024,160 

Temporary Loan Certificates 107,148,713 

Certificates of indebtedness 85,093,000 

Treasury 5 % Legal Tenders 32,536,991 

Past Due Treasury Notes, not presented . . 1,503,020 

State Bank Notes 78,867,575 

Tliree Year Treasury Notes 30,000,000 

Total Amount, $1,996,678,770 

Circulating medium December 1, 1873, 

United States Notes $367,001,685 

Fractional Currency 48,000,000 

Certificates of Indebtedness 678,000 

National Bank Currency 350,000,000 

Total, $765,679,685 

Showing a contraction from September 1, 1865 
to December 1, 1873, $1,230,999,085. 

The people did not realize what their representa- 
tives in Congress were doing, and, as a matter of 
truth, we will add a majority of those representa- 
tives did not know themselves. 

The granting of authority to the Secretary of 
the Treasury, or to the President of the United 
States, or to both of them jointly, to use their 
discretion in regard to the volume of the people's 
money, or the issuance of bonds, is something that 
cannot be intelligently explained by a reference 



TRUTH ERRAND. 101 

to the authority of the Constitution ivJiich delegates 
those poivers to Congress alone, or as a matter of 
safety to the people whose welfare and happiness 
is thereby placed at the discretion of two individu- 
als, wdiose plans and ideas may be as antagonistic 
as the commission of their "discretion" is foolish. 

We may say that the people were to blame, 
and in a great measure they were ; but who can 
the people trust if not the representatives they 
select, and even those representatives may, in 
turn, had some excuse for not knowing what was 
going on, for they were not trained to know the 
dirty schemes that usurers resort to, and were 
wholly unsuspicious of the dark schemes the con- 
spirators were secretly pushing through by the 
employment of duped tools with delegated 
powers which Congress would never have allowed 
if it thought its confidence was going to be be- 
trayed and the American people made victims of 
the most vicious and unprincipled despoilers the 
world has ever known. 

But Congress was not attending to its duty, 
and passion was rolling the waves of sectional 
hatred, whose seas the usurers kept in disturb- 
ance for the purpose of limiting the vision that 
might take in their jolans. The citizens of the 
Eepublic had listened to a lot of Republican yelpers 
and a lot of Democratic ones, and finding that one 
set screamed only about the policy of the other 



102 TRUTH ERRAND. 

set in regard to the ways to be pursued towards 
the late rebellious States, they thoughtlessly 
allowed themselves to be made believe that their 
welfare was involved in such issue. 

And on came the inevitable result, the exist- 
ence of whose causes were unknown to Congress, 
unknown to the American people whose individ- 
ual members saw nothing but the hand of an 
inexorable fate working against them that their 
pride must hide and try to overcome at any cost. 

And that tale which has been told before in 
plain and homely language of the conditions that 
precede a financial panic can be told without the 
usurers' endorsement that the trouble was " caused 
by over-trading, over-production and wild specu- 
lations;" the while calling the readers' attention 
to the fact that previous to the working of the 
usurers' conspiracy the people were free from 
embarrassment and out of debt. 

Money grew less plentiful and business men 
grew uneasy. People did not pay as punctually 
as before. Buyers that had paid cash right along 
delayed payments, then asked for a little time, 
reporting customers slow in making payments. 
Credit commenced to take place of cash. Notes 
of individuals commenced to be used largely, the 
usurers offering accommodations on good paper. 
General business grew a little slow, for interest 
was getting larger. Business men had to raise 



TRUTH ERRAND. 103 

more money, and they went to the usurers and 
executed mortgages on their property, and the 
usurers helped them let their pride drop easily by 
speaking of the "terrible conditions of every- 
thing" and how they had been obliged to take a 
greater number of mortgages and lend more 
money on collaterals than ever before and 
at "higher rates." Some business houses paid 
curb-stone brokers as much as three and four per 
cent, per month for accommodations. A manu- 
facturing house worth many millions received 
accommodations on a call loan at the rate of 
eighteen per cent, per annum. Another large 
house was more lucky and got the favor at 15 per 
cent. Business men fared hard, but — hark! 
what is that mighty crash? It is the coming of 
the panic of 1873! — the falling of business houses 
all over the land. When the money was in the 
hands of the people and the usurers could not con- 
trol it all the business men could live — but with 
the usurer, his favors and taxation on top, march- 
ing in comes "smash." 

Usury ! hunted and hated by church and man 
for centuries, had now placed millions of energetic, 
respectable citizens of the American Republic 
where they were powerless to defend themselves. 

The forced suspension, or diminution of opera- 
tions by the business men reacted upon the people 
and caused extreme embarrassment in every direc- 



104 TRUTH ERRAND. 

tion where people were dependent upon their daily 
wages or small savings for an existence. Many 
factories and works of different kind could give no 
work to men through inability of getting means to 
go on, or of disposing of their productions if they 
succeeded in procuring such means, while most of 
those that continued in operation reduced the 
wasres of their workers. 

This panic was memorable for being the first 
period in the history of our country in vvhich hun- 
dreds of thousands of men willing and anxious to 
work Imt unable to procure it in their localities, 
resorted to the plan of trying to find it in other 
sections of the country, traveling from place to 
place until the whole land became covered with 
men moving in all directions in the hope of find- 
ing some employment. Without means of paying 
their way they fell back on the only thing that 
was left them to do in order to keep up an exis- 
tence, by living on berries or apples they found 
growing wildly by the wayside, or resorting to 
cultivated fields for turnips, tomatoes or other eat- 
able flowerings of vegetation, and when these 
failed the citizen of the great American Republic, 
driven by desperation of hunger, became a beggar 
at back-doors for enough food to keep them from 
perishing. 

And how did the assembled wisdom in our State 
Legislatures meet the conditions that confronted 



TRUTH ERRAND. 105 

them in this great, plainly-marked wave of grow- 
ing poverty among their fellow countrymen ? 

Instead of going to Avork and seeking out its 
causes for the purpose of exterminating them 
they showed such a lack of manly thought as to 
establish the fact that they were so blind to 
moral responsibilities and to their own condition, 
being only happier chance, as to consider that 
repressive legislation against their unhappy 
fellow-citizens, going through the country looking 
for work, by making it a punishable offence for a 
traveling stranger to ask for anything to eat. 

These laws which teach men to steal, rather 
than to beg, when they are hungry still stand on 
the statute books of many of our States, and will 
probably remain there until we have men in the 
halls of legislation who are men and wise enough 
and great enough to take hold and tear them out, 
and substitute those in their stead that will make 
the usurers, who rob men to such ill conditions as 
to make beggars and tramps, the outlaws instead of 
their victims. 

And not only is the panic of 1873 memorable for 
the tramps, the poverty, the degradation that fol- 
lowed in its train, but because through all time in 
all preceding history of the world men may look 
in vain to find so powerful and so far reaching a 
conspiracy for suddenly changing the condition of 
a prosperous Nation to want, and trials, and busi- 



106 TRUTH ERRAND. 

ness wrecks as that one which in the 1873 panic 
made the people understand something was 
wrong. 



CHAPTER XX. 

THE PANIC OF 189o AND THE USURERS' BUSY 

TIMES. 

With hearts that are black in sin 
Men's wealth the usurers gather in. 

The panic of 1893 differed from that of 1873 
in these particulars. The 1873 panic first struck 
the business men, and their embarrassments, fail- 
ures and suspensions of business reacted upon 
and injuriously struck the people, while the panic 
of 1893 was the direct result of the people's 
impoverishment through interest drainage. 

To such an extent were people made poor 
through this drainage that there was nothing in 
the shape of markets able to purchase goods and 
return to the business men the usury they had 
paid or gone responsible for. 

And with the increase of poverty in the mar- 
kets increase of travel to the usurers for loans 
became the order of the day in the hope of tiding 
things to better days. 

But the people had been drained until they 
could not purchase goods when cut to one-half of 



TRUTH ERRAND. 107 

their former price, and the business men could 
not go on and sell goods for prices that did not 
realize the cost of the goods. 

And all the big cloth signs covering the busi- 
ness buildings in continuous flow throughout the 
streets of our cities and towns, announcing fabu- 
lous "bargains," "going out of business" and 
"bankrupt stocks" and "dissolution sales" could 
not stimulate any life in business. 

A leading business man has said that the panic 
of 1893 was a bankers' panic ; but it was not a 
bankers' panic in the sense that he implies. 

It was the harvesting time of the banks and all 
the great interest schemers who had worked the 
people for all they were worth, and now felt the 
presence of the opportunity for gathering in their 
taxes, either in money or in valuable income- 
bearing property at low prices, and squeezing the 
business men for increased tribute under plea of a 
tight money market, so as to scoop up such profits 
as the business men had gathered in the past 
few years. 

The business men in the order of business had 
paid or given securities for the usurers' taxes, 
ex|)ecting, as they had been doing, to be able to 
recoup themselves in their exchanges or transac- 
tions with the people; but now the ungrateful usur- 
ers, knowing no friendship in business, were going 
to make the business men, having good securities in 



108 TRUTH ERRAND. 

hand, pay smartly for any favors they asked to 
help them over their embarrassment in facing the 
fierce competition in markets abnormally con- 
tracted by the people's poverty. 

Busy days those harvesting times of the 
usurers I Courts, clerks, lawyers and sheriffs and 
hosts of employes are kept busy filling out forms, 
putting up schemes, and flying in all directions, 
for the usurers' crops are to be gathered. Panic 
and poverty in the outside world, but picnic times 
and days of gladness among the usurers, who are 
now taking from others everything of value 
within reach ; and all this hustle, and bustle, and 
jigging and flying of courts, and clerks and lawyers 
and sheriffs is but for the purpose of installing 
thieves as owners of something they do not own, 
except as thieves own that which they gather as 
thieves. 

And the interest schemers with their stolen 
wealth have planting times as well as harvesting 
times during panic periods and are always on the 
lookout for what will bring in a good income. 
With big eyes and no scruples they scent these 
bargains from afar, and they boldly scheme to 
steal by tricks, or buy if they cannot steal, valua- 
ble properties. 

Railroads they encouraged into accepting loans 
to improve their road beds or terminals as soon as 
they were momentaril}^ embarrassed by their in- 



TRUTH ERRAND. 109 

creased expenses through the usurers' levies, as 
well as many which could pay their expenses were 
it not for the under plotting, were hustled into the 
bankruptcy court and bid in at song prices and 
lashed into "• systems " with some one road as the 
backbone for a new series of swindling. 

Street car lines especially attract their attention 
through the great cheapening of their operations 
by electricity and their greater employment 
through the quickened movement. With a con- 
tinuous collection of the same fare as was estab- 
lished in war times, when horseflesh, hay, grain 
and supplies of all kinds were high, the usurers 
were quick to see that large revenue could be fig- 
ured out of them, and they bought them up in all 
directions, cheaply where they could scheme it 
that way, and at an advance where they must pay 
it, and then dumped the lines of many cities into 
the hands of syndicates for both usurous and stock 
swindling purposes. 

And how cunningly these old usurous rascals 
always work. Knowing that the people in all lo- 
calities were eager for quicker methods of convey- 
ance, before gobbling those roads they sent their 
officers to the Legislatures of their States and rep- 
resented that it was necessary to have a franchise 
for a long term of years in order to float their 
bonds to pay for the conversion of their lines into 
electric ones, and thus secure a " contract." 



110 TRUTH EREAND. 

Everything that turns in a " big income," or the 
spot casli quickly in volume that will allow fleecing, 
the usurers are after, and they have secured, and 
are daih' procuring more firmly, such a grip upon 
the cash-gathering concerns of the country that lit- 
tle cash will be obtainable for the purposes of 
agriculture, manufacture, and commerce, except 
at ruinous interest bearing rates that will so ham- 
per and obstruct their outlets as to establish the 
usurers in continual command of their movements. 

Busy times ! very busy times, indeed ! have the 
usurers in panic periods. Harvesting from the 
past and planting for income from the future, 
while agriculture, manufacture and commerce are 
paralyzed throughout the domain of their activity, 
and tens of millions of people drained to poverty 
bv usurous taxation are struu^txliuoi: to u'et the bar- 
est sort of an existence, while hundreds of thou- 
sands of human beings are begging for something 
to eat in the streets of the cities and on the high- 
ways of the country, and hundreds of thousands 
are being driven to commit crime in order to get 
something to support life, and tens and tens of 
thousands are dying for want of proper food to 
sustain life throughout the conhnes of the Ameri- 
can Republic. 

Foul usury, be it said, to liuman shame, 
For men's poverty and degradation is to blame; 
And yet we boast this as a Christian land. 
And help uphold the usurers' plundering hand. 



TEUTH EEEAND. Ill 



CHAPTER XXI. 

WHAT IS THE AMOUNT OF MONEY PEE CAPITA IN 
CIECULATION ? 

[From Dye's Government Counterfeit Detector.] 

EealizijS'G that the amount of available money in a country is a 
potential factor, if indeed it does not correctly measure the degree 
of its prosperity, I am interested to know, from the standpoint of 
your journal, the actual amount of money, per capita — gold, silver 
and currency — now at tlie disposal of the husiness interest of the 
country; in other words, the practical amount now in circulation in 
the United States ? 

I know that as reported by the treasury department, the total 
amount of money of all kinds in circulation September 1, 1894, was 
$1,646,671,481. Assuming, despite the peculiar sjistem of book- 
keeping, said to be practiced by the treasury, that the amount stated 
to be in circulation is correct, and estimating the population at 
68,500,000, fhe per capita is found to be practically .$24. Let us see 
how this is proved. 

Of the total amount outstanding and in circulation, $603,860,000 
is in gold coined or issued. Deducting the amount of gold coin in 
the treasury, there is in round numbers, $.500,000,000 of gold now 
claimed to be in circulp^tion. Does any sane business man suppose 
there is one-half of this amount of gold in actual circulation in this 
country ? If so, let him show his hand. Virtually, gold is out of 
circulation. Other than what the clearing houses may have avail- 
able, there is practically no gold in circulation. Of this reported 
500 millions of gold, there is no account taken of what has been 
used in the arts and industries, nor what has been lost or taken out 
of the country in all these years. 

The above total amount includes $8(5,516,800 subsidiary silver, of 
which $60,000,000 is now counted as in actual circulation. Who 
believes that all the small coins minted before the war are now in 
use, especially since certain half dollars and half dimes command. 



112 TRUTH ERRAND. 

respectively, from $100 l-o $400 each ? They long since disappeared 
from circiilation; as have also the 20,000 silver dollars coined in 
1804. The only half dozen of these dollars now known to be in 
existence are held at 1000 dollars apiece. Yet, saysBLr. L. C. Bate- 
man, they are all classed as per capita circulation. And this fiction 
has been running through all the treasury reports for thirty years. 
The remainder of our money consists of notes and certificates, 
which every year necessarily lessens in quantity to an enormous 
extent. The amount privately secreted, annually lost, worn out, 
burnt up, taken abroad, etc., aggregates many millions. 

Again, $67,000,000 of our paper money are in denominations of 
.$10,000 each: Do you use such bills to pay off your help every 
week? Nearly $200,000,000 are in bills of $1,000 and $500 each, 
while $500,000,000 are locked up in bank vaults. 

Unlike some dead men, dead money really counts no figure. 
From these plain facts, one can see that the amount of money in 
actual circulation is not over but under 50 per cent, of what is 
claimed to be by the treasury department. 

Geo. a. Bacon. 

Washington, D. C. 



CHAPTER XXII. 

MONEY. — DEFINITION OF FIAT AN ORDER; A 

DECREE. 

Money is a fiat establishment and represents 
selected matter bearing a stamp of identification 
empowered by competent authority to perform 
certain offices among men, and derives its effec- 
tivity from the power of the force that decrees its 
being and not from any self-contained value that 
has power to make it a measuring unit for other 



TRUTH ERRAND. ^ 113 

property of the world as the usurers claim gold to 
possess. 

The usurer seeks to keep up a mystification 
about the properties of money and as long as they 
can mix up and twist up our writers on political 
economy, newspaper editors, and the small, crafty 
individuals who pose as our statesmen, they feel 
assured they can entrap their game and continue 
their plundering of the people. 

Too long have the people of this country wal- 
lowed through the disasters, trials and poverty cre- 
ated by usurous abstractions, and if the Republic 
is to live the intelligent citizen must learn what 
money really is, and not be ensnared by the 
sophistry which draws him within reach for the 
usurers' plucking. 

The United States Congress is the only power 
in this Republic that can declare what shall be 
money, and it can make, stamp, invent or fabri- 
cate money from any substance it may choose, 
and in such volume as it may wish. 

By bearing this fact in mind, and also the defi- 
nition of the word fiat, we all ought to be bright 
enough to realize when the usurer sneeringly 
speaks of fiat money through his newspaper organs 
that it is only fiat money that we can have under 
any condition, and that the gold dollar, which the 
usurers keep their clutch upon, is fiat money as 
well as the national bank notes. 



114 TRUTH ERRAND. 

No convention of mankind ever assembled to 
usher in any of the metals, not even gold and sil- 
ver, as the materials to use for money ; and the 
claim of the usurers that '• gold was divinely fur- 
nished" for that purpose finds its "bed-rock of 
principle" in the usurers' desire to darken the 
minds of men that they may use them as will- 
ing slaves. 

As money, in a rough sort of way, the metals 
came to be used as such in the night-time between 
savagism in its breaking form to a crude semi- 
civilization in the liour of its infant birth, Avhere 
the line of demarcation was so faint that the cross- 
ino; from wildest rudeness to a forward trend of 
intelligence was hardly discernible in the dance 
of the white, yellow and copper nuggets with the 
shells and animal teeth in its primitive ornamen- 
tation. 

Men have become bewildered to such an extent 
by "theories " about money that they are unable 
to realize the great truths of it ; that experience 
should have taught them; and the usurers and the 
political economists work energetically to keep up 
the mystification by fiddling theories, until their 
songs wind up with the same old tune, that 
" money in addition to being a medium of exchange 
is also a measure of value, a store of value, a stand- 
ard of value." 

They say money must have a unit of value, 



TEUTII ERRAND. 115 

must have within itself, without any regard to any- 
thing else, that property on which the money unit 
mu-it be based; and grave statesmen knowing 
muchly of the theories of law, and very little of 
the percentages of thieving embodied in usLirous 
practices ; and learned men from the colleges, rep- 
resenting education more than intelligence, have 
accepted the usurers' teachings and deceived them- 
selves and labored to deceive us all as to what con- 
stitutes a basis for money, and by whom that 
money should be issued. 

Money need not contain within itself a recog- 
nized commodity of value, for it may be nothing 
more than a bond stipulating that on demand or 
after some specified time, some property or ser- 
vice will be exchanged for it ; and even that 
property or service may not be in existence to-day, 
for a solvent government able to maintain per- 
petuity can declare and issue money as a bond on 
some property or service whose structure or rendi- 
tion is of the future. 

The unit of value in money humbuggery loses 
its mystifying nature when we recognize the fact 
that a unit of value and a shifting money measure 
are altogether two different things, and that a 
unit of value, as distinguished from a fiat of 
value, is something which does not, has not, and 
cannot exist ; for such a unit must represent some- 
thing unalterably fixed in value, and any declara- 



116 TRUTH ERRAND. 

tion that so much of anything shall always repre- 
sent just so much value is an assumption that can 
have no standing in fact. 

We have tables of weights and measures which 
are arbitrary assumptions and establishments, and, 
though they serve their purpose, they betray in 
their want of convenience in their units and mul- 
tiples the smallness of the intelligence that selec- 
ted and established them, and we have also the 
highly intellectual and scientific assumption known 
as the Metric or Decimal System of weights and 
measures, whose unit is so jealously guarded from 
alteration that not a single particle of dust is 
allowed to fall upon the piece of platinum used 
as the measure of the unit; but all tliese units 
represent the starting point for multiples of exact 
divisions of matter capable of being continuously 
employed by men in correct duplication with the 
aid of the exact science of mathematics, while a 
unit of value has no fixture, as not only matter is 
involved, but also mind, the most susceptible thing 
to varying influences that God has placed on 
earth. 

Money is a medium of exchange among men, 
and all the subsidiary functions attributed to it 
are powers that exist outside of any unit of value 
centralization in money's component material, as 
is clearly demonstrable in the fact that we are 
frequently obliged to give varying amounts of that 



TKUTII ERRAND. 117 

money, although it may be gold, for, like commod- 
ities purchased at different and CTen at the same 
time for like things from different individuals. 

The governing conditions that affect the ex- 
changes and movements of men such as demand, 
tender, time, or place, changes the standard and 
measure of value in money when placed against 
the services, commodities, wants and schemes of 
men ; and the mathematical unit of the first order 
in numbers on which a monetary unit is estab- 
lished, is the only unit of first order that money 
system can logically have, and no matter what 
property may be allied to that unit it cannot form 
a conjunction with mind and establish a unit of 
value independent of other matter of earth ; and 
no power of money, even its fiat force, which is 
its strength, can act otherwise than as an adjusta- 
ble measure that will work upon decreed lines, 
maintaining, increasing, or decreasing their dimen- 
sion as the conditions and minds of men dictate 
in mood, time and place ; and that money is only 
protected in its measuring office from violent ex- 
tremes of change by its debt-settling power, which 
makes men compete for the privilege of redeem- 
ing it in their services or commodities, in order 
that they may command the services and commod- 
ities of others, who also wish to redeem it for the 
same purpose, and not because it may be conver- 
ted into the commodity of gold which fifty men 



118 TRUTH ERRAND. 

out of a million never seek as a commodity for 
exchange. 

Therefore, we say that a unit of value as a con- 
fined establishment in the material of a money 
standard is a mythical thing, an unjustified as- 
sumption, a Will o' the Wisp in the marshy lands 
of fallacious theories which can dance nowhere 
save in those marshlands where the cunning 
usurer sends those great pretenders, our modern 
political economists and mystified statesmen, to 
hunt by the danchig, gaseous light for an intangi- 
ble something which does not exist ; while the 
usurer, selecting different ground for a different 
purpose, springs upon his victim like a beast of 
human prey. 

The usurer does not believe in the absurdity of 
a unit of value as an embodied property in money, 
outside of the use of such theory for the purpose 
of deceiving men so that he may enslave them and 
steal the fruits of their labors ; and all education 
that fails to teach this fact fails to teach men a 
fact they should know in order to protect them- 
selves from the deceit, trickery and fraud of the 
usurer, whose one great aim in life is the robbery 
of men. 

In the American Republic we have the most 
highly educated and intelligent nation upon 
earth, and it only requires a concentration of 
thought on the part of the people to dislodge 



TRUTH ERRAND. 119 

from their minds those impressions they have 
received from an irresponsible and soullessly con- 
ducted newspaper press at the usurers' dictation, 
and they then will make a decision that their 
enterprise will not be tied in movement to await 
the favorable juggling of any kind of metal 
money, or be made to hand over to usurers the 
result of their productions. 

The usurers cry "honest money" — "sound 
money" while drawing from paper money, and 
paper substitutes for money untold hundreds of 
millions of dollars of revenue, and the people 
must decide whether usury is to continue as the 
great and over-reaching business of the Nation. 

The money of the country to-day is made the 
instrument for robbing the masses for the benefit 
of certain rich classes, and every dollar of our 
monetary circulation draws to the usurers yearly 
property of the people several times greater than 
itself, while the productive power of the country 
meets nothing but obstacles that hinder its move- 
ments. 

There are two ba«es on which money in the 
future will be founded by intelligent nations and 
they are sound and will give to money that safety 
and completeness of volume that will never allow 
a few conspiring individuals to control the move- 
ments of men, and they consist of a service basis 
and a property basis bonded in the government note. 



120 TRUTn ERRAND. 

But outside of issuing money bonded on ser- 
vices and property every nation should have a 
primary money. That is a money of first rank, 
of first importance. The usurers seek to make 
gold the primary money, because they can juggle 
their paper money upon it to rob the people while 
always keeping the gold in their own possession. 

Who should own the money of a country except 
the whole people of the country ? It should 
never be issued by individuals. Nations cannot 
get along without money. Primary money 
should not be a "promise to pay." It should be 
an ESTABLISHMENT OF MONEY BY 
THE SOVEREIGN WILL OF THE PEO- 
PLE. Carefully issued as to volume, and the 
volume never lessened, other kinds of money is- 
sued as promise to deliver value or services can 
have steadiness of valuation and circulating power 
imparted to them by being made under certain 
conditions exchangeable for the primary money. 

A good endorsement for primary money would 
be on the front : — 

PRIMARY MONEY of the UNITED STATES. 

PROPERTY OF THE PEOPLE. 

TO COUNTERFEIT IS DEATH. 

LEGAL TENDER OF LAST RESORT FOR ALL DEBTS DUE, OR OWED 
BY, THE UNITED STATES, OR INDIVIDUALS THEREOF. 

And on the reverse : — 

TO LOAN FOR USURY IS PUNISHABLE BY IMPRISONMENT, FOR- 
FEITS CITIZENSHIP RIGHTS, AND NULLIFIES RIGHT OF RECOVER- 
ING SUCH LOAN. 



TRUTH ERRAND. 121 

CHAPTER XXIII. 
CAPITAL. 



PLENTY OF CAPITAL, BUT USURY INTERFERES WITH 
ITS EMPLOYMENT. 



Capital exists in our country with sucli fullness 
that the energies of our people are only held in 
check by the usurous drainage and tricks which 
keep our people from using that capital. 

It is important that we all thoroughly under- 
stand what relation money bears to capital, and 
what capital is ; for only on a correct understand- 
ing of what constitutes capital and the relation 
that money bears to it will a clear insight be 
obtainable of the province of money. 

Money is an actuate* of capital, not capital 
itself, but an agency of capital which man has 
united with the forces of capital for reasons of 
convenience and economy. 

The coercive power that this agency of capital 
exerts over the divisions of capital has caused 

* Definition of tlie word Actuate — To incite to action; to iuHuence. 
Tliiis: A weight, spring, an electrical ciirrent, steam or other forces 
may be the actuate of a machine. Money is one of the actuates of 
capital ; one of the great iutiuencing forces that gives it motion. 



122 TRUTH ERRAND. 

men to make the mistake of treating it as the 
great division of capital, while many treat the 
agency as the principal. 

Correctly stated capital is nothing more or less 
than the power men can employ to use the things 
of earth. 

Whether it is to create money, or do other 
things of earth, or direct opportunities earth offers, 
or refers to what man past has accomplished or 
brought within our control, or to what man pres- 
ent has or can create or control, capital is fully 
embraced in the dehnition of "man's power to 
command things of earth." 

Political economists tell us that it is necessary 
to arbitrarily use terms to distinguish certain fac- 
tors, and that those terms must be rigidly applied 
in order to establish the science of political econ- 
omy, whether or not those terms are susceptible 
of a different meaning. 

We would not get confused or misled by them, 
nor themselves get deceived, if after uniting things 
of many divisions they would give such union an 
arbitrary term, and the divisions, arbitrary names 
and classifications ; but they throw the many for- 
ces that keep up production and reproduction into 
one heap and style it capital, and then soon pro- 
ceed to treat money, a created agency of capital, 
as capital itself. 

Capital is not stored savings or surplus earnings 



TRUTH EERAND. 123 

represented in money ; for money is nothing but a 
creation capital establishes, and if all the stored 
savings and surplus earnings in money were swept 
from existence capital could immediately repro- 
duce such an amount, and meanwhile capital would 
only suffer while installing a live force in the 
place of as much destroyed force in its agency as 
those swept away stored savings and surplus earn- 
ings would represent. 

A money existence has its being in the fixing 
of ever^^thing that enters in its composition as 
matter that can no further become a part of 
reproduction. It cannot increase its kind, for 
money does not make money, as the catch-words 
of the usurers assert, for its own life necessitates 
the death of everything that has entered into it, 
and only on its own death as money can a new 
birth bring it forth as something that may be 
used in a reproduction. 

Separating the appointed agency of forces from 
the forces themselves, we arrive at a point where 
we can proceed to discuss the relations the agent 
bears to the principal, the while bearing in mind 
that the agency is completely impotent outside 
of its office. 

As long as money is an actuate of capital, a 
power that is important for giving capital motion, 
it must follow that as that motive power is weak 
or strong capital will be affected by it and move 



124 TRUTH ERRAND. 

with slowness or rapidity ; therefore, we reach the 
conclusion that capital will create wealth that will 
be vastly greater than that required for consump- 
tion when a goodly supply of reliable, untaxed 
money exists ; and that when that supply is short, 
and in still more intense degree when short and 
highly taxed, capital becomes hampered in all 
directions; and furthermore, that any attempt to 
overcome the shortage of money that denies to 
men the use of the capital at their command by 
the issuance of usurous substitutes for money is 
not only detrimental to the full use of capital by 
men, but is a means of robbing the great produc- 
ins; and consuming classes for the benefit and 
enrichment of classes whose sole object is the 
transfer to themselves of the benefits of the crea- 
tion capital causes. 

It has not been for want of capital that so many 
of our manufacturers, farmers, store-keepers, job- 
bers, producers and all kinds of business men 
have been driven from or made impotent factors 
for carrying on operations in business and their 
places supplanted in occupancy by vast aggrega- 
tions, not of capital, but of the means of controll- 
ing capital, by having power to direct its impor- 
tant actuate, the money agency — that force which 
gives power and motion to capital through the 
opportunities it affords men to exchange their 
commodities or productions, be they what they 



TEUTH ERRAND. 125 

may, directly labor, or results of labor, or things 
considered necessary or desirable for sustain- 
ing human life, its comforts, pleasures, or neces- 
sities. 

Capital consists of many factors that in a larger 
or smaller degree of union, or separately, can be 
employed for the purpose of bringing forth or 
increasing production, or of accomplishing any- 
thing men consider to be desirable within the 
limits of human power, and any treatment of its 
actuate as capital itself is but a prostitution of 
truth for purpose of falsehood. 

The American people have not suffered for 
want of capital, but through want of facilities for 
using capital; for never was capital so abundant 
and so efficient at any time in any part of the 
world as it has been for the past quarter of a cen- 
tury in the United States ; yet through all that 
time millions of people have gone down to prema- 
ture graves through privation, want and worri- 
ment, and greater millions have wrecked their 
health in their endeavors to maintain themselves 
against measures established to ensure their 
downfall. 

Usurers have created those conditions by their 
robberies, and have by plan, plot and bribery 
succeeded in dominating our legislation so as to 
increase their leaching incomes, by the fixing of 
capital, so that its great fruits are no longer to go 



126 TRUTH ERRAND. 

to those who are entitled to receive them, but are 
to be turned over to great syndicates, trusts, cor- 
porations and individuals with extended business 
ramifications that can give sufiicient bonds to col- 
lect and turn over to the usurers such taxation as 
these usurers levy upon the people. 

Henceforth, until the people positively and 
firmly say nay, all the mighty discoveries and 
inventions of men, past and present, in the harness- 
ing of steam, electricity and all elementary and 
mechanical forces of production, the education, 
the labor and skill of men — all important and 
prime factors of capital whose benefits belong to 
all men — are to be operated as tribute gatherers for 
the usurers, and directly or indirectly in com- 
pounded amount the people must yield to the 
usurers' demand, whether it comes in through 
national or State taxation, transportation char- 
ges, rents, direct interest and discount charges, or 
indirect taxation through the commercial or com- 
modity exchanges, or by any means usurers may 
use to leach the people. 

Usury creates no capital, but hinders the use of 
capital it cannot tax. The employers of capital 
are never encouraged or aided by forced abstrac- 
tions from the rewards they have labored to gain. 
When usurers can dictate in an important meas- 
ure who shall use capital, and under what condi- 
tions capital shall be used, and the amount of tax- 



TRUTH ERRAND . 127 

ation the workers of capital must render unto 
them because of the usurers' control of the money 
actuate of capital, it is time for the people of a 
nation to raise themselves above the level of fools 
and know the truth — that the money actuate of 
capital is a simple and easily created thing which 
the government is in duty bound to take in hand 
and establish in such volume, and under such con- 
ditions, that the usurer cannot find a profitable 
business in his thieving vocation. 



CHAPTER XXIV. 

THE usurers' five PER CENT. CASH, NINETY-FIVE 
PER CENT. CHECK CLAIM. 

The usurers' science lays down as fundamental 
law that a small volume of money will compel 
agriculture, manufacture and commerce to resort 
to a use of credit instruments to bridge that void 
which cannot otherwise be crossed. 

Any proposition to increase the volume of 
money in the hands of the people always sets 
the usurers to plotting, and they hasten their 
tools to the halls of legislation to button-hole the 
representatives of the people, so as to find out 
their standing upon the matter, and to haggle, 
discourage and intimidate those whose views are 



128 TRUTH ERRAND. 

considered unfavorable, by telling harrowing tales 
of calamities that will come and the dreadful 
responsibilities resting upon the shoulders of those 
who make such direful mistakes as to interfere 
with the people's prosperity. 

And the usurers, or their tools, follow the peo- 
ple's representatives from the opening of their 
bed-room doors in the morning until their final 
closing at night, contrasting ways that may have 
pleasant ends to those that hereafter may be 
made unpleasant for the representative, quoting 
remonstrances from this section and that sec- 
tion of the country from business men whom the 
usurers by telegraph, mail or personal interview 
liave frightened into believing there would be a 
"business disturbance." 

The usurers claim that 5 per cent, of money 
against the volume of total business transactions 
of a nation is a sufficient supply to have, and gull 
the people into an acceptance of its correct esti- 
mate by showing bank figures that represent the 
people's transactions to be settled by employment 
of checks to the amount of 95 per cent. 

Without sufficient data to work ujDon, we will 
eet down to fio;ures that are within our reach, and 
which show beyond doubt the magnitude of the 
grasp that the banking system of the United 
States has upon the people. 

The Secretary of the United States Treasury 



TRUTH EREAND. 129 

being pressed for an estimate of the amount 
involved in the daily transactions of the banking 
institutions of the United States appointed Sep- 
tember 15, 1892 as a day for all the banks to 
keep an account of receipts of all kinds, with the 
result that the reports returned showed the receipts 
to be upon that day $333,205,213,, of which 90 
61-100 per cent, was represented in checks and 9 
39-100 per cent, in money, making the check volume 
reach $299,105,023 and the cash $32,100,190. 

Allowing 309 legal banking days in the year, 
we will, on multiplying them with the days' 
receipts, reach as the aggregate amount of the 
banks' yearly receipts the enormous amount of 
$102,959,410,817, of which $10,047,359,470 was 
in money and the balance in private instruments 
of circulation taking the place of money, and all 
of which was, although private substitutes for 
money, just as available for iisurous manipula- 
tion as if of recognized legal tender money. 

$32, 1 00,190 daily payments to banks require the 
passage of an amount of $400,000,000 every 
two weeks, or twenty-four times a year, or of 
$1,600,000,000, which the treasury books ficti- 
tiously show to be the circulation of the Nation, 
once in two months, or of nearly $900,000,000, 
which is larger than the real aggregate circula- 
tion, once a month in total. 

In the passage of three hundred million dollars 



130 TRUTH ERRAND. 

of credit instruments in one day, or at the rate of 
ninety-three billions of dollars in one year, against 
legal money receipts that reach thirty-two millions 
in one day, or less than ten and one-half billion 
in one year through the banks, any intelligent 
person must realize that there were many notes of 
individuals aggregating vast amounts that would 
never have been given if a proper amount of legal 
tender money was in existence, for business men 
are not so fond of making themselves subjects of 
direct interest taxation as to make a habit of issu- 
ing or receiving personal time promises in the 
shape of notes when cash is easily obtainable. 

Now, as this official report shows indisputably, 
if there is actually 10 per cent, of money paid in- 
to the banks in their business dealings, and not 
only the possibility but a well-founded probability 
that the percentage of real money used would 
have been vastly greater if a sufficient volume 
of money existed, does it not painfully show an 
impoverishing shortage in other channels of trade 
connected with human living and transactions 
which would under any correct or adequate vol- 
ume of money always maintain a large average 
amount resistably against bank manipulation. 

The liquidation effected through the clearing 
house, as in New York, is undoubtedly done on a 
95 per cent, check and 5 per cent, cash basis ; but 
the clearing house is nothing but a profitable 



TRUTH ERRAND. 131 

arrangement between banks where they settle one 
account by offsetting it against another, using only 
a small amount of money to clear away such bal- 
ances as may remain. 

The usurers boast of the clearing house as a 
great "economizer of currency," and point it out 
to our '• statesmen" and "political economists" as 
a inighty reason why a very large circulation of 
money is not needed. 

The juggling of the clearing house "econ- 
omizes ' money for the bankers' benefit, allowing 
them with safety in the absence of any undue 
excitement in money matters to employ fully nine- 
tenths of the business men's daily deposits for the 
purposes of usury on their own behalf. 

The "economy of the clearing house" of the 
usurers is a dangerous thing for the people, for it 
makes every man who deposits money in the 
banks for the purpose of use in settling business 
accounts become a furnisher of means for the 
carrying on of usurous schemes by the usurers for 
their own benefit, with the result that any inter- 
ruption of their business by the business men mak- 
ing any extra calls for their own money brings 
forth the report of " a tight money market." 

We are all aware of a late instance when the 
New York clearing house boldly assumed the 
prerogatives of government in defiance of law and 
issued millions of dollars' worth of notes of their 



132 TRUTH ERRAND. 

owD fabrication to be used for money under the 
name of "New York clearing house certificates," 
to get over the disasters and exposures that would 
have fallen on the New York banks if they could 
not bridge the demands made upon them by the 
business men of New York for the use of their 
own deposits. 

And when called to account for their outrage 
upon the rights of the Government some of their 
apologists arose on the floors of Congress and 
declared that " the patriotic efforts of the New 
York bankers had saved the country from untold 
disaster, and that their breach of the law must be 
overlooked through their desire to benefit the 
people;" and instead of being tried, convicted 
and imprisoned for high treason, the New York 
bankers congratulated themselves upon their abil- 
ity to state things in a very good way to the 
people. 

The American Republic has failed to furnish the 
people with a sufficient volume of money for the 
transaction of their business, because the govern- 
ment has failed at the most vital point affecting 
their welfare and happiness by its continuing the 
vile paternalism that European governments have 
long bestowed on a favored usurous class on ac- 
count of the aid they receive from them in hold- 
ing the people down. 

As the usurers alone furnish the accommoda- 



TRUTH ERRAND. Ido 

tions business men require in a place to deposit 
their daily receipts where they can check them 
out at pleasure, the tendency of centralizing the 
entire money of the country, taken in the line of 
general business transactions, into the hands of 
usurous jugglers has developed more and more 
until it has become a menacing danger to the 
interests of the whole people. 

The business men carry their daily receipts to 
the banks and the railroads, telegraph and other 
corporations carry their receipts there, and after 
these parties make their deposits the volume left 
outside is very small. 

The railroads at certain periods check back 
into circulation enough to pay their employees 
and other necessary expenses, which may be 
roughly estimated as less than one-half their 
receipts, the other part being held for payments 
for interest on bonds and dividends on stock into 
the hands of a usurous class. 

The business man makes his deposits, and, as he 
wants to keep as large a balance to his credit as 
possible at the banks, bills he ought to pay are 
often delayed on this account to the great em- 
barrassment of those that ought to receive their 
money, and whom, if they are not obliged to resort 
to seeking loans at usurous rates, may be held 
back from making movements that would be bene- 
ficial to themselves and the community. 



134 TEUTH ERRAND. 

Thus is a small volume of money brought down 
until only a low volume of money exists outside 
of the usurers' possessions, and the small operators 
in business of all kinds, who constitute the man- 
agement of two-thirds of our productive forces 
and also employ, outside of those engaged in rail- 
way service, more than two-thirds of the labor of 
the country, are hampered and hindered and 
forcibly prevented from employing as much labor 
as they would, or doing as much business as would 
pay them if we had an adequate circulation that 
could not be put under usurous control. 

The usurers do not want a 5 per cent, money 
circulation of money against the business volume of 
the country, or even against that of the bank busi- 
ness, for the magnitude of such operations is some- 
thing they never dwell upon when discussing or in- 
triguing to limit the Nation's circulation of money. 

We have shown conclusively, from the only 
source from which it can be shown, that the bank 
receipts aggregate 103 billion of dollars in a single 
year, and even a circulation of 5 per cent, of this 
amount would give a volume of more than 5 
billion of dollars. 

But the grand razzle dazzle that is held up to 
public view is the clearing house settlements, 
where claim is balanced against claim, and no 
more money is required than will cover up the 
ragged edges that remain. 



TKITTH EKRAND. 135 

The usurers declare the circulation to be large 
enough, and as the largest part of it is in their 
control why should they want more? 

With an actual active circulation that cannot 
exceed one billion of dollars at the most, if it ever 
does reach that amount, they are able to make 
it dance a jig of joy for themselves in the bank 
handlings of so many tens of billions of dollars 
of interest-gathering substitutes for money. 

But some day the people will awaken to the 
vast amount of interest taxation assessed upon 
them through the banks and multitudinous other 
schemes and ask themselves the sensible question: 
"Why have we worked as slaves for plundering 
usurers when all their taxation has been juggled 
upon a circulation of legitimate money whose 
active amount has never been more than a billion 
of dollars?" 

And they will come to the conclusion that the 
government of the Nation must stop its class 
paternalism, and that the usurers who have so 
long been under its care and direction in fleecing 
the people shall stand aside, and that justice shall 
be dealt to the people, loJio are the Nation^ and 
cannot he subjects for paternal consideration hy the 
officers of the government. 

The Constitution of the United States asserted 
the sovereignty of the people, and reinforced that 
declaration by declaring their right to bear arms 



136 TRUTH ERRAND. 

as somethins: that should never be interfered with 
by any process of law or under any pretext; and 
this sovereignty cannot be interfered with or les- 
sened by any of the acts done at any time by any 
agents this sovereignty appoints to look after its 
rights ; and so, when this sovereignty shall declare 
they are tired of paternalism for usurers the 
people will get free from the usurous avalanche of 
their yearly billions of dollars taxation. 

The usurous taxation is needless, is uncompen- 
sating, is cruel, and the people acting through the 
government can throw it all one side, as with 
a sweep of their hand, by the establishment of 
banks and clearing houses that will extend to 
business men and the people in general all the 
facilities the usurous banks of to-day afford, and 
with absolute safety for the depositors, a condition 
the private banking system of to-day cannot 
guarantee. 

And the government can make it a revenue 
system, established upon a basis of service to tiie 
people — a foundation upon which governments 
of the future of highest developments must gather 
their ordinary revenue. 

Supplant the usurous system with that of a ser- 
vice accommodation by the government, for it can 
extend at one-half of one per cent, favors to the 
people in a more beneficial direction than the 
private and usurous system ever did. 



TRUTH ERRAND. 137 

The securities tliat are good enough for the 
usurers should be good enough for the government 
to work upon ; but their 7'eliahility must he 
greatly increased with the enhanced poiver of our 
producers and the people in general ivhen they are 
allowed to keep the hillions of dollars 7ioio annu- 
ally stolen from them for self strengthening , instead 
of constantly weakening their resources by turn- 
ino; those billions of dollars to the usurers. 



CHAPTER XXV. 

THE CONDEMNATION OF MANUFACTURERS. 

Free traders and many other " reformers " are 
constantly dwelling upon the undue profits that, 
in their imagination, manufacturers are making; 
and so much has this idea been cultivated and 
resown, not only by those parties but by the 
usurers in screening their thieving, that large 
numbers of mankind actually feel that a manu- 
facturer is an oppressor. 

In former days manufacturers enjoyed opportu- 
nities for acquiring a certain amount of wealth 
which in the then existino: condition of thino;s was 
considered large, its dimensions being generally 
magnified by his spending a good part of it in 
erecting a fine residence, out houses and stables, 



138 TRUTH ERRAND. 

and making nice looking lawns, setting out trees 
and dabbling in agriculture by the employment of 
a few men in an aimless sort of way. 

Men who procure their information from the 
written tales of olden day, or their new rehash- 
ings by writers who re-dish and pepper them up, 
may believe the manufacturer to be a natural rob- 
ber of men ; but if they follow up the conditions 
under which he labors, the perplexities and uncer- 
tainties that confront him, the usurous taxation 
he has to meet and try to recoup, and weigh well 
the absence of disposition for investing his surplus 
earnings into outside schemes for filching a greater 
income, the occupation of his mind with the intri- 
cacies of production with its ever shifting, prob- 
lems and crossings and competition, and any 
fair minded man must come to the conclusion that 
this person, who of necessity commingles largely 
with his help, is not the human devil that fools 
and usurers paint. 

You can individualize firms and persons who 
employ men they illy pay and overwork to the 
point of a savage devilism, but these men are the 
exception, and even they would undoubtedly be 
more considerate and better men if usury w^as not 
fixing the possibility of their margin on a very 
narrow line. 

Most manufacturers to-day only exist by the 
practicing of a very close economy, for they are 



TKUTII ERRAND. 139 

exposed to usurous taxation all along the line, 
and it requires close figuring to receive and secure 
a profit when facing markets that usury compels 
to be fjrrindinai: ones. 

Destroy the conditions under which the usurer 
exists and the haggled markets will disappear, 
and the manufacturer, the farmer, the trader, the 
laborer in all lines of production, and all the peo- 
ple, can live and enjoy an existence that will 
never call for human beings devouring one another, 
hyena-like, as in these days, where even the 
laborer, bemoaning his own oppression, turns in 
self-defence for self-maintenance to the intensi- 
fication of the oppression of his brother workers 
by calling down the prices of their productions. 

If he who makes two blades of grass to grow 
where but one grew before is a public benefactor, 
then the manufacturer is on the list, for he helps 
the people to live by extending the fields of 
employment and the benefits of production. 

Kill the usurer and extend the reachings of 
the humanizing factors of beneficial production 
throughout the world. Make free from the bot- 
tom sands of earth which bear the foundations to 
the uppermost bricks upon its chimneys the fac- 
tory and its machinery from all direct taxation, 
extending the agency of the State to furnish intel- 
ligence of the conditions in distant markets, and 
the terrible struggles between employers and 



140 TRUTIT ERRAND. 

employees as to wages, and employers for markets 
will pass away and give entrance to a peaceful 
satisfaction all around. 



CHAPTER XXVI. 

LIFT UP OUR SCHOOLS. 

We send our children to the schools, 
Then send them out as "educated " fools; 
To help along the usurer's knavery, 
And hold humanity down in slavery. 

Men in all ages of the world have been more or 
less directly educated to rob from one another, 
cunning instead of honor being at the real bottom 
of the teachings of parents and schools. 

Fool ourself as much as we may, and still when 
we examine it closely we must admit that even 
our very school system, of which we feel so proud, 
is nothing else than a more polite, but hardly a 
less intense, continuance of .the idea that worldly 
cunning finds its justification in the success of 
men. 

We cannot dispute the fact that when we send 
young men to our schools and colleges to train 
for a business life we educate them in that soul- 
less cunning which only differs in degree from a 
proper classification as a teaching of "theft" by 



TRUTH ERRAND. 141 

the showing of the dividing line that separates the 
legal from the illegal side. 

Our school systems are very faulty indeed, if 
they are not wholly godless. We send children 
to school and it seems to be our whole ambition to 
crowd into their minds as much as we possibly 
can, compelling them to memorize large quantities 
of matter, a good deal of which is harmful, instead 
of being beneficial, through the destruction of the 
child's ability for reflection on vital matters by his 
overloading with matter of little account. 

We say our schools are godless because they fail 
to impress on the minds of the children those 
principles of morality which are the very founda- 
tions of manhood and womanhood, and which are 
necessary and should be widely cultivated if 
we wish to perpetuate free government on earth. 

Instead of all these indirect teachings in our 
schools that success in life, as measured by the 
accumulation of dollars and cents or of property, 
is a goal to strive for, it should be directly taught 
that they were only justifiable when honorably 
won. 

If, instead of concealing their effects, the power 
of the interest tables and percentage rules for 
abstracting the wealth of men and the checking 
of the owners of real capital from its employment 
had been properly shown in the schools who will 
say that the usurer would sit as he now does in 



142 TRUTH ERRAND. 

command of the world with millions of people at 
his feet shivering with impoverishment and degra- 
dation. 

The power of reflection is not taught to our 
children, and their education is only in keeping 
with the artificial surroundings of the day ; for 
they are made the victims of a continual cram- 
ming of matter which they are not shown how to 
make beneficial to themselves in after life. 

Leaving the school house are they enabled to 
go out into the world as they ought ? Have they 
about them those powers which the long years 
they spent in obtaining an education should have 
left them equipped with? Have they the self- 
reliance they should have to keep them from 
falling before temptation? They certainly have 
not, and still they are going out to struggle in a 
world "run wild" with crime and deceit and 
desire for getting gain at any cost ! — out into a 
new school to have their character, which is yet 
but as clay left in a plastic state, moulded by the 
habits of the people they come in contact with. 

Our young people on leaving the schools should 
have within themselves a broadness of thought 
that would make them detest that which is 
wrong, and a desire to advance only the right — 
the very rocks of a well formed and well fixed 
character in keeping with what should be the 
broad foundations of a free government. 



TRUTH ERRAND. 143 

Go to your schools, see that they have text- 
books that will lead them right. Teach them 
how the interest tables and the percentage rules 
have been worked all over the earth so that 
sheeneyism cannot longer dominate State and 
Church. 

Petition your school committees, your tovv-n 
councils, your boards of aldermen, your State Leg- 
islatures and your Congresses to have text-books 
placed in your schools that will show the abstrac- 
tions that have been made from men. 



TRUTH ERRAND 

TELLS THE REAL CAUSE WHY THE FEW ARE SO VERY 
RICH AND THE MILLIONS SO VERY POOR. 



THE " PROTECTION " THE PEOPLE OF THE AMERI- 
CAN REPUBLIC NEED IS PROTECTION FROM BEING 
ROBBED BY USURERS. 






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